


All the young dudes (ii)

by gamesformay



Series: all the young dudes [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: All seven years, F/M, M/M, Marauders, Marauders' Era, all the young dudes, cw: blood for chapter 5
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2019-07-18 08:56:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 54,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16115087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamesformay/pseuds/gamesformay
Summary: (1971-1978. A love story, a war story, a record collection.)Part 2





	1. strung up

**Author's Note:**

> This is part 2 of the fic; it won't make much sense if you haven't read the first one.
> 
> Here's an extra-long chapter to get the second half of the story started. Thanks to everyone who's been following/commenting on atyd; y'all keep me at it. Thanks for reading!

 

***

 

“Padfoot’s been a long time, hasn’t he?”

James tosses his wand aside and catches Carlos just in time. Tesla slinks away to hop up onto Peter’s bed, sulky. “Oh, yeah. Where d’you reckon he’s got to?”

“Who knows.”

James stands. “Best go see what he’s up to now, rather than fish him out of the hospital wing come dawn.”

“Take the Cloak,” Peter suggests. “It’s after curfew.”

“Nah, I’ll just be a minute.”

“But—”

“Give it a rest, I can dodge Filch in my sleep. See you.”

“Yeah…”

As luck would have it, James has barely got past the portrait of the Fat Lady when he sees Sirius coming his way from the other end of the corridor.

“Oy, Black! Took your sweet time, didn’t you? We thought you finally fell in the lake and died, we were planning a party and everything.”

James first realises something odd’s going on when Sirius doesn’t spar back. He runs down the dark corridor and meets him halfway. Before he can get a word out, there’s a crack of lightning like a car engine backfiring. He jumps and yelps (it was a yelp, he’s man enough to admit it), but Sirius just gives a lazy sort of grin.

“Lovely night, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, peachy,” James says. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Dunno what you mean.”

“You just seem off.” The two of them make their way toward the Fat Lady. “Where were you, anyway?”

“Fancied a stroll.”

“Was it a prank? You know it hurts my feelings when you do pranks without me, it’s like you’re cheating on me.”

He was just giving Sirius shit again, he doesn’t expect the answer to be anything other than a ‘shove it, Potter’ before they move on. But Sirius turns to look at him with that big smug grin, shakes back his hair, and says, “Maybe.”

“We hadn’t anything planned— what’d you do?”

The easeful hang of Sirius’ shoulders and the lazy tilt to his smile tighten as James watches and suddenly Sirius is in one of his frenetic moods, the ones where he laughs a lot and is more prone to breaking stuff and seems to conduct static electricity, that weird gleam in his eyes he only gets once in a blue moon, and yeah, something’s wrong. James knows Sirius’ moods better than anybody on the planet, maybe tied with Regulus, and they don’t swing _this_ fast.

“I made all of our lives easier, that’s what I did. The mother of all pranks, Prongsy.”

“What? Should’ve let me in on it, if it was so great.”

“Couldn’t’ve. Had to seize the moment.” He gives a weird, breathy laugh. James feels…uneasy. “All our problems? Everything that could screw up our plans, get us in trouble? _Gone_.” His eyes have got that weird gleam, a _lot_ of it.

Unease has left the building, time for full-fledged alarm.

“Mate, you don’t look right.”

“Don’t I?” There’s another crack of lightning and Sirius rocks back onto his heel, gives a bark of laughter to the ceiling. “Couldn’t have asked for better weather!”

Alarm. Yep, alarm. “What did you do?”

“I got rid of Snape.”

James blinks. “Explain exactly what you mean,” he says slowly.

Sirius seems to exude static electricity.

“You’re gonna love this, you’ll appreciate the genius of it. Because— cause— alright, hang on, let’s make one thing _perfectly_ clear,” he says on a shaky exhale, “I didn’t kill anybody. I’ve been walking around the castle working out the options, and in none of them does anybody die. Option one: nothing happens besides Snivelly gets a good scare. Option two: Moony bites him. Hilarious, just deserts, learns not to be a hateful prick, the whole nine. Maybe he’d even _leave school_ , don’t think he’d bear to show his ugly face around once all his little Death Eater pals figure out what he is, would he? Or he’d just have to go find his own ramshackle house to transform in once a month because I am not about to force Moony into sharing with that grease stain, nor are _we_ going to share once we get the Animagus stuff worked out, but anyway, alright. Option three: Moony doesn’t quite manage a _bite_ but he does fuck him up pretty bad. Apparently that happens sometimes, the person gets the werewolf to fuck off before they actually manage to, y’know, fully sink their teeth in, but they still get pretty badly injured. So Snape gets nice and mangled, and maybe he’ll get so mangled he has to leave school! A bloke can dream, right?

“But, anyway, what all three of these options have in common is that we give that nosey, meddling bastard a good scare, and then he stops messing with us and sneaking round and spying on us and our lives are a _lot_ easier.”

There’s a roll of thunder but James barely hears it. He isn’t hearing so great. He shakes like he’s sweating out a fever, with that same sensation that everything inside of you is too hot and everything outside of you is far away.

“Snape is going to the Shack?”

“Yeah, s’what I’ve just told you, keep up.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Okay, well, it started with him trying to be all tough, and he said ‘If you—’”

“Sirius,” James says. “Tell me what you told him.”

“I said to wait thirty minutes and then to poke the knot with a stick and follow the tunnel, alright? What’s at the end,” Sirius says cheerfully, “I left a surprise.”

“Thirty— how long ago was this?”

“Er…” Sirius checks his watch. “About forty five minutes ago.”

There’s a half second in which James is one hundred percent certain that he’s going to be sick. He spends that half second frantically scanning the corridor for a convenient vase or something, but then he decides that there’s no time for vomiting and magically it passes. “Fuck,” he says.

Then he runs.

 

***

 

Peter sits on his bed, petting Tesla and absorbed in his Arithmancy textbook, when the door slams open. Sirius goes to the window, looks out at the storm. “Lovely night.”

Something’s wrong. It came storming in with Sirius, and Peter knows— in the way he sometimes just _knows_ things— that something bad has happened, something really bad, but it takes a bit for him to work up the courage to say, in a small voice, “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, why?”

“It just seems like—”

“It’s nothing.”

“Where’s Prongs?”

Even when his back’s turned, Sirius’ voice can still bite. “Leave it, Pete.”

“I think, er. I think I’ll turn in.”

“Yeah.” He leaves looking out the window. “Me too.”

The two of them change and get into their beds without a word. Sirius shuts off the lights with a flick of his wand, and Peter stares up into the darkness.

He wonders where James is.

 _He can take care of himself,_ Peter thinks. _What’s the worst that could’ve happened?_ A brief flash of blue-white light is split-second warning before thunder crashes. Tesla meows, uncurling herself from Peter’s side to stalk up and down his bed.

He isn’t sure how long he lies there in the dark, wide awake, listening to the storm. But right when he’s starting to think that maybe, just maybe he’ll sleep tonight, there’s sound from Sirius’ direction: a creaking bed frame, feet hitting the floor, a few harried footsteps.

Peter can’t take it anymore. He climbs out of bed and catches a glimpse of Sirius standing in front of the window and staring out.

Sirius whirls around. He’s peculiarly jumpy. “Jesus, I thought you were asleep.”

“I—I—I just wanna know where James has gone.”

“None of your business, alright?”

“Please?” His voice creeps higher, just like he knew it would. “I’m—I’m just getting worried, so if you could tell me I’d—”

He expects Sirius to explode, he’s prepared for it, but it takes Peter by surprise when Sirius bursts out laughing.

“Oh, Wormy.” Sirius looks at Peter with a horrible, hysterical sort of grin and declares, “I’ve ruined everything.”

 

***

 

In his fifteen-almost-sixteen years of life, James Potter has regretted many of his actions. Never before, though, has he kicked himself for anything as he in this moment kicks himself for not bringing the bloody Cloak.

“Come on, be a lad, would you?” James whispers. “We’re on the same side here! Besides— I’m not even Remus! You don’t hate _me_ , remember?”

There’s a moment where Peeves looks as though he’s actually considering it, hanging upside down in the air with a thoughtful look on his face. Then he flips over and whizzes away into the darkness, screeching, “STUDENT OUT OF BED! STUDENT IN THE CORRIDOR!”

“Far out, thanks,” James says, and leaps into a sprint. He’s made it this far, the top of the grand staircase is visible from here, if he can just reach it— with any luck Filch is on the other side of the castle—

Nope, no luck at all. He hears a familiar wheezing as running footsteps come hurtling around the corner.

“Oh fuck,” James says with tremendous feeling.

“ _You!_  Stop right there!”

“No, no, no, not now!” He runs even faster, ignoring the stitch in his side; the stairs are right there, he’ll get to the front doors if it kills him, he’s _got to_ —

Some metre and a half shy of the grand staircase, James trips on thin air, stumbles, and falls flat on his face.

 _This is why you’re only cool on a broomstick,_ he thinks.

“Aha!” James feels a bony hand haul him to his feet. “And just what are you and your rotten friends up to now, eh?” Filch drags James along with an iron grip to his arm. “Dungbombs, destruction? Not this time, not this time!”

“Listen, tonight’s no good for me,” James says. He fights against Filch’s hold, but the scrawny old bastard’s stronger than he looks. “If we could save this for another time—”

“Think you’re so clever, running about at night and wreaking havoc— see what Professor McGonagall thinks about this, yes we will!”

“How about I hang round in the corridor tomorrow night? You can catch me then!” He’s feeling increasingly frantic; Filch pulls him steadily away from the stairs and Merlin knows how far Snape’s already gotten down the tunnel at this point, he’s got to be halfway to the Shack already, oh fuck oh fuck oh _fuck_. “I won’t run or anything, I’ll take however much detention you like, just _please_ tonight I’ve—”

“Oho, you’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you! I wasn’t born yesterday, boy!”

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. “Look,” James says, “I really don’t want to do this, but you’re leaving me no choice. Lives are at stake, and—”

“What I wouldn’t give for the old days, string ’em up by their ankles, that’d serve ’em right, but we’ve gone soft now…oh, but we’ll see what Professor McGonagall has to say, yes—”

James takes a deep breath, steels himself, says, “I’m sorry about this, I really am,” and kicks Filch in the groin with all his might.

It’s enough; Filch drops like a sack of Bludgers, howling and cursing, and James takes off again. He shouts over his shoulder, “Sorry! Lives at stake!” and hurls himself down the stairs three at a time.

 

***

 

The words are hardly out of Sirius’ mouth before he’s taking them back.

“No, no I didn’t,” he says. He paces the dormitory, stalking like a caged wolf, and stirs Peter’s wandlight with black shadows. “It was a _joke!_ If James wants to go and— it’s none of my business, is it? It was just a prank, and if James wants to risk his own skin for Snivellus then that’s his fault.”

A flash of lightning bursts through the room, turning Sirius ghoulishly white, and when it’s dimmed again he’s back at the window, peering out into the rain. “He should be back by now, shouldn’t he?” Sirius asks no one in particular. He crosses to his bedside table to retrieve his watch. He glares at it. “Maybe. I can’t remember. Time is being odd, it keeps moving in fits and stops, I can’t _remember_ —”

It’s the dumbest question ever, but all Peter manages to get out is: “Did something happen?”

Sirius wheels around and Peter jumps. “It serves him right!” Sirius snarls. “Sneaking round like that, like he has been for years, trying to get us chucked out! I did us all a favour! He’s so _smug_. Thinks he’s so clever but he’s an ugly, sneaking, lying, self-righteous little shit— you would’ve understood, Wormtail, I wish you’d been there. You’d’ve understood that he deserved it!”

Peter’s trying his best to keep up. He’s becoming increasingly sure that whatever’s happened is time-sensitive and it’s not at all helping the hot fear broiling in his gut. “Snape…Snape was spying?” he says. “On James?”

“No, no he— wait, yeah, he was! But that wasn’t even— that was a Lily thing, he took offense to how much James is obsessed with her because nobody else likes the greasy git, reckon it makes him possessive. But that’s not what I’m talking about. He was spying on Remus. What, I was just supposed to take that lying down? It’s sort of poetic, isn’t it, since Remus is the one he was messing with in the first place?”

Sirius stops pacing. He fixes Peter with his eyes, his voice gone low and cold. “You know, Snivellus had the bollocks to lie to me? Confronted him about Regulus and he fucking denied it.”

Peter feels a sick lurch of horror. _Oh no_ , he thinks. _Please no…_

“I don’t regret it!” Sirius announces. “Not a bit! Let James do what he wants! Snivellus tried to wreck my little brother’s life— he deserves whatever he gets!”

It’s the worst feeling Peter’s ever experienced. Every other burst of terror or guilt or misery he’s ever felt in his life combined can’t hold a candle to this.

 _Oh please God,_ he thinks. _P_ _lease, please, don’t let it be my fault. Whatever it is, don’t let it be my fault._

 

_***_

 

“Of course it's _fucking raining!_ ” James shouts.

His voice echoes over the dark grounds, drowned in the rumble of thunder. He looks up at the vast expanse of black clouds overhead, whirling and expanding like blots of ink dropped into water. The cold slices through him, and the air smells like electricity. _This is going to be unpleasant,_ he thinks. Then he sprints down the sloping lawn, slipping and sliding in the mud, as a bolt of lightning cracks the sky.

Through the stinging sheets of rain he can just make out the outline of the Willow careening ever closer, black and thrashing against the steely sky, as if it would fight off the storm singlehandedly. James admires its nerve. He reaches it and discovers a new problem.

"Where the hell is the branch?" he asks the Willow or the storm or the universe. James looks around. The branch— such a lovely, special branch, just long enough to save you getting walloped— is always right here, it _always_ goes back to this spot so the next person who comes along can poke the knot with it and freeze the tree. James paws at the water striping his glasses, wipes them on his sodden front, but the branch is still nowhere in sight. It's not until he squints ahead at the Willow itself that he spots it: it’s propped up against the trunk where, no doubt, Snape left it.

Fine, he’ll just summon it. He reaches into his pocket for his wand.

It's empty.

“You’re joking.” And then he’s presented with a memory of throwing his wand aside before he left to fetch Sirius and not thinking to pick it up again because he's the biggest bloody idiot to ever walk the earth, oh _shit_.

The Willow is thrashing away, as short-tempered trees are wont to do, and ready to pound James to pulp if he approaches. The only means of freezing the thing is propped up against the trunk, totally useless. His wand is up in the dormitory, also useless. Snape is no doubt halfway down the tunnel at least by now, mere minutes away from discovering Remus and getting mauled and bringing them all to ruin. James paces in a frantic, muddy circle, waiting for inspiration to strike or perhaps a bolt of lightning to put him out of his misery-- when he trips. Again. This time, though, it isn't over air. It's a rock, roundish and a bit larger than his fist.

_“That’s it!”_

Granted, it's not perfect. James looks around: no other rocks to be seen. He’s got one shot. The wind whistles and the rain is blinding, it's dark except for the odd flash of thunder, and the Willow's branches are constant moving obstacles. So, yeah, not the greatest of conditions. Not ideal.

But that's nothing, he reminds himself. He's a Chaser, isn't it he? This is no worse than Gryffindor versus Hufflepuff third year, when there was that dirty great storm and visibility was terrible but still James scored them twelve whole goals against that Hufflepuff Keeper what's-his-name-- this, this is nothing! This rock is a Quaffle, the branches are Hufflepuff what's-his-name, the knot is the goal hoop, and the stakes aren't life-death-and-or-expulsion, just some Quidditch points. He can do it…He's got to do it…He throws.

The rock smacks squarely against the knot and the Willow swings to a halt, frozen. James lets out a celebratory whoop that's lost to the howling wind, sprints forward, and throws himself into the dark dampness of the tunnel.

His feeling of victory is short-lived; he forgot how bloody cramped this passageway is. James curses his recent growth spurt, curses his lack of a wand. It's really, really dark in here.

"Alright," he says to himself. "No problem. Just a pitch-dark, cramped tunnel with your arch nemesis and a werewolf at the end. Keep your wits about you, Potter."

He charges forward.

 

_***_

 

“Whatever he gets, I don’t care!” Sirius says. “Fucking mocked me. ‘Pretty’ this, ‘Black’ that! Asked me if me and Remus were an item-- said I was a fruit just because he thinks he’s funny, not because he knows I actually _am_ —” Sirius whirls around to face Peter with a hard, challenging look on his face. “And I _am_ , I’m a fucking fairy, what d’you think about that?”

There must be a tactful way to respond to that but Peter doesn’t know it, so he says, “I know. I mean, I knew. Already.”

Sirius is so visibly stunned that his hysteria falls away. “Did Prongs tell you?”

“No. I didn’t know he knew.”

There’s a long stretch of silence. Sirius has got a peculiar look on his face, like he’s trying not to smile. Tesla hops down from Peter’s bed and hides underneath it. The storm rails away outside.

Sirius exhales a laugh to himself. “I should’ve known. It’s not like you ever managed to trick me, like you did the others. I know you’re more than you let on.”

This, impressively, might be the most confusing thing Sirius has said tonight. “What?”

Sirius steps toward him. “Little Peter from Lancashire, with his maths and his cat. Can’t magic his way out of a paper bag, can’t look a teacher in the eye, all of it, fine. James believes it, but James’ll believe anything.”

“I…what?”

“It’s okay, I get it,” Sirius says. “You’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had, of course I get it. James is just too bloody wholesome to understand. He’s never anything but the one person, he’s only ever _James_ and that’s it, but not everybody’s like that. You and me, we’re not like that. We stay in our sheep’s clothing because nobody much likes the wolf when they meet him, do they? James doesn’t get it, but I know you do.”

“I—I—I d—don’t,” Peter says, and oh Christ the fucking stammer, and he tries to think of something, _anything_ to say to that, to whatever the hell it is Sirius is talking about. “I—I don’t know what this has g—got to do with…with me?”

And Sirius is back to laughing, pacing. “What’s it got to do with you, a good question, let me—” Then he stops, plants his feet, and explains:

“Snape was spying in the Entrance Hall and saw Remus leaving with Madam Pomfrey. After I caught him I told him how to get through the Willow and that he ought to follow the passageway to find out where Remus goes. A bit later I told James about all this, and he went off running. To stop it, I suppose. As we speak the two of them are, presumably, duking it out in the tunnel and may or may not face Remus in his full moony form, and how this relates to you is me realising right this moment that it makes no difference whether or not I tell you that this is all happening because I know you, Wormtail, and I know that you won’t do a _damn thing_ to stop it.”

Peter feels as if he is out of his body, watching himself. “I won’t?”

“Nah.” Sirius shrugs. “Haven’t got the guts.”

“But…” Peter says. His voice sounds small. “I thought I was more than I let on? What…what about the…the wolf, and the sheep’s clothing?”

“See, that’s the thing about your wolf, Peter,” Sirius says, crossing to his own bed. He climbs in and lays down. “It’s got a strong instinct for self-preservation.”

 

***

 

James loses track of time in the tunnel. His back screams in pain and his knees ache, his hands are caked with soil from trying to feel out the walls as he trudges forward, his vision goes funny in the darkness. So funny, in fact, that he swears for a second that he sees a light ahead—

"OY!" he shouts. "SNIVELLUS! I mean— SNAPE!"

The distant pinprick of light swings around. Far ahead he hears a familiar voice: "Potter?"

"Thank me later!” he calls. “We've got to go, come on..."

He crawls closer until he can see the disbelief on Snape's face in the wandlight. He's wearing the expression of one who wishes that the whole tunnel would cave in and smother James to death. "Get lost!"

"Listen to me,” James says. “You don't know what you're doing, you're in real danger, I know Sirius is the biggest prat alive but you've got to go back!”

“Oh, sure!” Snape charges ahead again. "It's too late! Black's spilled the beans! I’ll see you lot expelled and that's the end of it!"

James follows after. “We might very well be getting expelled, I’ll grant you that, but you aren't gonna be around to see it if you keep going!"

"Is that a threat?"

"No, it's a fact!” James shouts. “I’m trying to save your stupid life, you ungrateful arse!”

Snape makes a derisive sound and moves faster. There’s nothing else for it: James lunges forward and grabs him by the ankle. Snape aims a kick that hits James right in the nose, James sees stars and feels something crack, but he's too overwhelmed by the dark and the panic and the loathing and his already aching body to register the pain, and he keeps talking—

"For Merlin's—” His voice sounds funny. He reaches up and feels something hot and wet. "Jesus fuck, did you break my nose?"

"Sod off!"

Broken face or not, James isn’t about to stop now. “I deserved that, you can break _all_ our noses as soon as we get back— give all four of us nice decks to the face, won’t try to stop you— "

They reach an uphill slope in the tunnel. James recognises that slope.

"Oh shit oh shit oh shit," he pants, muffled by the hand clutching his bleeding nose. “We’re almost there— please, you've got to stop!”

Snape only seems to hear part of that. "Almost there! Wonder if they'll give you a last meal, Potter, or if they'll chuck the whole lot of you straight out tonight?"

It's hard to tell in the bumping, wavering illumination of Snape's wand, but James thinks he sees a sliver of light ahead...light like the crack above the old crate that covers the opening at the end of the tunnel…

With a great cry of “STOP!” James hurls himself forward again, cracks his head spectacularly against the ceiling of the tunnel, and lands on Snape, pinning him to the ground.

“GET OFF!” Snape howls. They kick and thrash and claw at each other, yelling obscenities, until— somehow— the scrawny berk gets the better of James and shoves him backwards. Snape tumbles toward the light with a shout of victory.

In the flurry of motion Snape drops his wand, and the light goes out. James can just make out his hands closing over the top of the crate.

"NO!" he screams, but too late: Snape shoves at the crate and it skids away, flooding the tunnel with light.

 

***

 

Often when Peter was a child he would go to the cinema or read a comic book and wish that his life offered him moments in which to do cool, brave, heroic things, like James Bond or Superman did. Young Peter wanted nothing more than to be brave, but he never seemed to get the chance. Growing up in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, opportunities were pretty thin on the ground.

It was only after going to a magical school where everything wants to kill you and falling in with the most popular kids in the place— two troublemaking adrenaline junkies and their werewolf pal— that these chances started to present themselves, and Peter discovered that bravery does not come as easily for him as he’d hoped. Not easily at all, in fact. As it turns out, ‘brave’ is a trait just like ‘red-haired’ or ‘flat-footed’, and you’ve either got it or you haven’t. It’s a bit of a let down, that.

But he wishes, sometimes.

“James hasn't got his wand," Peter says. Thunder rumbles outside the windows of the dormitory. “I saw him put it down."

Sirius hasn’t pulled the hangings around his bed. He lies there, eyes wide open and fixed on the rain-washed window.

"I should bring it to him," Peter says.

"Go to bed, Pete."

"James doesn't have his wand," Peter repeats to himself, wringing his hands. Maybe if he keeps saying it it’ll give him something to hold onto in the panic that threatens to drown him, like a mantra. “He doesn’t have his wand. I should bring it to him.” His breath is seizing up; he feels the damned stutter coming on but can do nothing to stop it when he says, “I-I-I ought to run out there now, t-to the p-p-passageway, and--"

"We both know you won't," comes Sirius' voice, flat. "Go to bed. James can take care of himself."

"But...b-b-but I—I—“

"You what? Spit it out," Sirius snaps.

It stings.

Instantly Sirius is sitting up and looking at him, a funny expression on his face. Shock? “Wait, that…” Sirius says. He swallows. “Sorry.”

"It's alright."

“No, it wasn’t,” Sirius says. Then he sighs and flops back down. "Just go to bed, alright?"

Peter knows what the brave option here is. He sees the wand lying on James' bedspread, useless. He thinks of James down in the tunnel, possibly about to face a werewolf with no way of defending himself. The brave thing to do is obvious, Peter knows it.

He can't do it.

“I…I…” Peter's trembling to his shoes as he goes and collects the Cloak from under James' bed. “I’ve got another idea."

He goes.

 

***

 

James never does understand the reaction he has in that horrible, suspended half-second after Snape pushes aside the crate blocking the entrance to the Shack. Even later it will never make sense to him why he’s struck so unable to move, or breathe, or think, or do anything at all besides crouch there at the mouth of the passageway and say, "Well, now you've done it."

Everything happens very quickly. The Shack's lit by firelight and it spills into the pitch-dark tunnel, blocked out by Snape crouching at the entrance. James sees the half-second in which Snape goes completely rigid, he hears the strangled shout of horror, he hears the heavy footfalls crossing the rotting floorboards of the Shack. And he really, really hears the low, canine growl.

"RUN!" James shouts, but Snape is frozen in place. They’re thrown into darkness as a figure hovers outside the lip of the passageway; James’ fear-shot mind catches into a loop of _run run run_ , but he doesn’t run. He leaps forward, grabs Snape around the middle, and hauls him backwards.

It’s just in time. They haven’t hit the tunnel floor when something shoves through the opening, thrown into nightmarish relief against the darkness, and James’ vision swims from the horror of it: the head and shoulders of the wolf, jaws snapping, eyes bulging, muzzle dark with its own blood—

 _Remus,_ James thinks. _That’s Remus._

“COME ON!” James shouts, and Snape doesn’t need telling twice— they take off down the tunnel, their panicked breathing not loud enough to cover the sounds of the monster as it tries to force its body through, snarling and clawing and gnashing its teeth.

Snape doesn’t relight his wand; they stumble forward in pitch darkness. The minutes stretch by in a wash of pain and frenzy. James’ mind goes white, he ignores the blood crusting on his face and knows nothing except _forward forward forward._ The sounds of the wolf fade behind them until there’s no sound in the backness but their breathing, and the ringing in James’ ears.

Neither of them speak. James has no idea what he’d say even if he wanted to.

James sees faint light ahead. They draw closer and he hears thunder, sees the bluish glow of the rain slanting into the mouth of the tunnel; closer still and he smells it, feels it gloriously cool on his stinging face. James pulls himself up through the gnarled roots, presses the knot by his shoulder, and falls face-first, aching and exhausted, into the wet grass. The rain whips at his back and he feels an appendage or two get sucked up by the mud.

“Sirius Black,” he groans into the swampy ground, “is a dead man.”

He hears fast, sloshy footsteps. James sees Snape’s ankles as he runs by, pelting up the lawn toward the castle.

 _Uh oh,_ he thinks.

“SNAPE!” he shouts, un-suctioning himself from the squelchy mud with considerable difficulty. He sprints after Snape’s retreating back, sodden clothes hanging off him like weights. “Stop!”

“Now you’ve done it, Potter!” Snape screams, hysterical. Even as he calls back at James he doesn’t stop running, flapping toward the front doors like a big wet bat. “The game ends here! You WAIT! _You just_ —”

“WAIT!” James calls. “You— you really don’t want to do this, whatever it is you’re about to do! You’re making a mistake!”

They’ve nearly reached the doors now. “It’s you and your mates who’ve made the mistake!” Thunder rolls, almost drowning out Snape’s cry of, “Let’s see how funny it is when I tell the _whole school_ just what Lupin is!”

What James wouldn’t do for a wand. Or the ability to hex the limbs off of people with his mind. “Listen to me, you ugly, ungrateful—”

A bright sliver of light falls over them, and they stumble to a halt. The front doors are pushed open from within, and the two figures silhouetted there swim into focus, one of them tall and wrapped in a tartan dressing gown, the other short and in turquoise pyjamas.

As Snape runs for the double doors he cries out, “PROFESSOR! It’s Lupin, he’s a—”

Now, James knows that Remus’ condition is no secret to Professor McGonagall. He’s aware of how bloody moronic it is of Snape to assume for a moment that she _doesn’t_ know. So, really, Snivellus is doing nothing but proving how big of an idiot he is by shouting out the secret in this moment. No harm done by it.

It’s only for good measure, then, that James flings himself through the air and tackles him face-first into the mud.

 

***

 

It's the most tremendous relief Peter has ever felt, standing there with Professor McGonagall and seeing both James and Snape running toward them, soaked and muddy but very much alive. It's less of a relief when James takes a flying leap and tackles Snape to the ground, but it isn't especially surprising.

"Potter!" Professor McGonagall cries. “Stop this _instant!_ "

James either hasn't heard her or isn't paying attention. Peter's money is on the second. James smushes Snape’s face into the grass, saying, "Who's--funny--now--you—!”

"POTTER!"

James looks up, releasing Snape’s head to drag a hand through his hair. Over the pelting rain he calls, “Evening, Professor. Didn't see you there."

“Get inside, both of you!"

"Professor…” Snape struggles to his feet and staggers forward, chest heaving. "Professor… it's Lupin….He’s—”

"I am well aware," she says. "Now--"

Snape balks. "You knew? You knew they let that _thing_ into this school and you—”

“You are already courting the loss of an astronomical number of points for Slytherin,” Professor McGonagall says, and she isn't even talking to him and Peter still cowers. “I recommend you _hold your tongue_."

Drenched and snarling, Snape pushes past them into the hall. Then Peter hears him exclaim, "What is _he_ doing here?!"

Peter turns around. His stomach climbs higher into his throat: crossing the hall toward them is Dumbledore himself, sweeping robes and all. Peter’s never seen him look this grave before. At his side is Sirius, arms crossed, eyes on the floor.

"Albus, thank Merlin. You—?”

"Received your message, yes," says Dumbledore. He sounds tired, which is so strikingly strange to Peter that it's as if he had shouted. "Just in time, it seems. I happened upon Mr Black on my way."

If the presence of Dumbledore is unnerving, it’s nothing to the expression of clear shame on Sirius' face. "I was just…investigating."

"So I see," Professor McGonagall says crisply.

James bursts through the doors, soaking wet, covered head to toe in mud and-- Peter sees with horror-- dried blood. As he gulps for breath he manages, “I really…could…murder you…Black.”

Professor McGonagall has gone white. "Potter, that isn't…"

James, seemingly remembering the horror film state of his face, waves a hand. "Nah, Remus didn't touch me. This was all _that_ git's doing."

"You're lucky I couldn’t do worse!”

"Silence!" Everybody falls quiet. Sirius and Snape continue to wordlessly glare at each other. James seethes in muddy silence, seemingly unsure of who he ought to be more angry with. Professor McGonagall smooths the front of her tartan dressing gown and says, "I shall fetch Professor Slughorn, he’ll--"

“No need,” Dumbledore says. “I think it's best if I take Severus from here."

"Horace is the boy’s head of House, certainly he--"

"I will speak to Severus," Dumbledore says, firmly now. His eyes fall on the door off the side of the hall, the one into the antechamber in which they'd all waited to be Sorted years ago. "This will do, I think..." He gestures to Snape. "Come along."

Even in the presence of the most famous wizard of the twentieth century, Snape hasn’t calmed down. "Professor, these four have—!”

"We will speak in private, Severus," says Dumbledore. His voice is quiet, but his tone shuts Snape up quickly. He gestures again and starts across the hall. "If you please..."

Grudgingly, Snape follows him. The door shuts, echoing loudly in the dim hall.

Professor McGonagall turns to the three remaining boys, two in their pyjamas and one sodden and bloody, and a look of great exhaustion passes over her face.

"Right," she says. She looks to James, around whom a sizable mud puddle is forming. “You said that the...you said Lupin didn’t touch you?"

"No, Professor."

She nods. “Pettigrew, escort Potter to the hospital wing. And Black…” Professor McGonagall turns to Sirius, expressionless. “Follow me."

 

***

 

Sirius has been in this office many times before. Sitting in front of this desk while Professor McGonagall tries to decide what to do with him is not a new experience. Under normal circumstances, it’d be comforting in its familiarity.

This is different. For starters, all those other times James was with him. And he didn't feel so numb.

Professor McGonagall has been pacing for a while. Finally she sits down at her desk, back straight, looks Sirius in the face, and says, “Well, then. What am I to do with you, Black?”

Sirius finds himself struggling to make eye contact. That is also new. "Detention?"

“No, I think not."

He looks up, stunned. "But...you always give me detention."

"Precisely. I cannot punish this as I would a normal offense, because this is not a normal offense. It would be an insult to Lupin to treat this as I would one of you and Potter’s”, her mouth goes thin with distaste, "pranks."

"But Professor, it _was_ a prank! I wasn't trying to— it was just a joke, he—”

“Black, if you are truly unable to distinguish between a prank and attempted murder, you are beyond my ability to help.” The usually taut lines of her face are weary. "Obviously, this is grounds for expulsion.”

Sirius' stomach gives a dizzying heave. "Expulsion?"

She pauses, staring as if to study him. He drops his eyes again. Professor McGonagall says, “You are aware I’ve been in correspondence with your cousin?"

"Yeah, she told me,” he tells his knees.

"Then you understand why I cannot expel you."

He looks up. “…No?"

"I will not send you back to that house. That burden will not be on me. Do you understand?"

The numbness is fading away, leaving Sirius nauseous. He thinks his hands are shaking. He nods.

Professor McGonagall sighs, pushes her spectacles out of the way, rubs her temples. "Fifty points from Gryffindor, I suppose,” she says. “For you and Potter, being out after hours."

Sirius nods again. He’s sick and shaky. He’d very much like the numbness back.

There's another long stretch of silence. Unable to look at Professor McGonagall, Sirius stares out the window instead. He can see the Quidditch pitch from here, silhouetted against the blue-black mass of the forest. The storm’s dying down; no more lightning over the mountains, just a miserable dribble of rain against the dark sky.

"I am not prepared to deem you a lost cause, Black."

Sirius stays facing the window. There’s pressure building behind his eyes. He squeezes them shut.

"Good, upstanding people have come out of difficult families. I've seen it before, and I wish to see it again." A pause, and then: "Sirius."

He looks over, startled; his first name sounds funny in her voice. She watches him with a hard expression in her eyes.

"I am giving you a second chance,” she says. “See that I don't come to regret it."

Sirius nods. There's a hard lump in his throat, cutting off all sound.

She looks at the window. As the storm fades the full moon is back in sight, a misty apparition through the clouds. "What you will do," she says, "is go to the hospital wing. Tell Madam Pomfrey I’ve sent you and that you’re to wait there until dawn.”

Sirius nods again, but he’s confused. Is he going to make beds? Clean bedpans? Why now, in the middle of the night? What sort of detention is this?

Professor McGonagall gets out a quill and parchment. She writes, pausing intermittently to stare at the parchment, contemplative. She folds it, hands it to Sirius, and says, "Give this to Poppy." She gets up and heads for the door.

Standing is more difficult than Sirius anticipated. His legs feel odd. She opens the door for him and says, "You are to tell Lupin about this evening's...events.”

"Yes, Professor.” His voice is soft and strange.

"Off you go, then," she says. She shuts the door behind him.

The hospital wing is just down the corridor from Professor McGonagall’s study, but the walk there seems long. He’s hyperaware of everything: the stripes of filtered moonlight across the floor, the soft snores from portraits on the walls, the sheet of parchment gone heavy in his hand. Was it really just this morning that he woke up Remus in his bed?

He knocks on the hospital wing doors for a long time, and Madam Pomfrey is irritated at being woken up. Her mood shifts when she reads the note, though, and wordlessly she guides him across the long dark room and its rows of beds. She stops at the far end of the room by a bed enclosed with screens, indicating a chair at its side.

“Wait there,” she says. “This is where I usually put him…it’ll be a few hours yet.”

Sirius sits. She exits into her office. He waits.

 

***

 

He’s nodded off in his chair when the doors creak. Jolting awake, Sirius blinks while his surroundings come into focus. The sky outside the windows is pink with sunrise, throwing the room into soft shadow. Quick footsteps echo in the quiet, and Sirius stands to see Madam Pomfrey hurry toward him, carrying something very large.

“I always Apparate him back,” she tells Sirius, out of breath, “but that just puts us at the school gates…still a bit of hike. Here, help me.” She adjusts the bundle in her arms— an unconscious Remus, wrapped in a sheet. Sirius has trouble discerning the colour of the fabric; it’s covered in dark stains. He hooks his arms under Remus’ knees and helps Madam Pomfrey shift him onto the neat white bedclothes.

“Not so bad, this moon,” she mutters, thoughtful. She pulls out an array of bottles from the bedside cabinet, sets them out in a line. “Some are worse than others, they— well, you know that. Who knows why, could be his mood, could be anything…”

She peels back the sheet. Sirius gets a glance of a lot of red before he’s lurching away, gripping one of the screen’s rods while a wave of nausea crashes over him. It’s like standing up too fast when you haven’t eaten anything; his vision goes fuzzy, and Madam Pomfrey seems to speak to him from the end of a long tunnel when she says, “Aim for the bin, won’t you? I’ve only just changed the linens.” He’s distantly aware of the wastepaper bin she slides towards him.

He shakes his head, forces the dizziness away. “I’m fine.”

Madam Pomfrey tuts at him, looking over Remus, towel in hand. “You’d think you’d be able to tolerate blood,” she says as she mops up a tremendous amount of the substance in question, “with your condition. You’re in here every other week to get something to stop bleeding.”

“Just a shock,” he says.

Distracted by her work— the wet gashes hacked into Remus’ torso, for starters, and Sirius’ stomach rolls over again— she hums vaguely. “Think this is shocking, you ought see a bad moon. Merlin forbid a Black should get bitten by a werewolf, this one’s blood coagulates on its own and still he barely survives them— dittany, the blue bottle there.”

Sirius passes it to her. “How long until he wakes up? He…he’s usually been up for a while before you let us see him, so…”

“Oh, an hour or two,” she says breezily. She douses a rag in dittany and presses it to an especially deep gouge across Remus’ chest. “After one like this he’ll be up in no time.”

“Can…can I help, or…?”

“Yes, keep passing me things.”

Sirius nods.

It goes on forever. Madam Pomfrey asks for things and he hands them over, and in between he’s free to observe up close the extent of the damage. The wolf seems to have gotten to every part of Remus’ body, ripping with teeth and claws and tearing off chunks of flesh that have to be blotted with dittany over and over again to grow back. Not all of the wounds are from biting and scratching. There are long, ragged fissures around his joints where the skin split as the bones underneath bent and expanded; Madam Pomfrey passes her wand over them and mutters a stream of incantations as the skin knits itself back together. At one point, without any warning, she gives Remus’ arm a deft twist and a shove, repositioning it in the socket with an awful noise somewhere between a crack and a crunch. “That happens now and again,” she says in response to whatever expression is on Sirius’ face. She drips dittany onto one last laceration on Remus’ knee and watches the flesh bubble and mend before corking the bottle and setting it on the bedside table.

Unprompted, a memory presents itself to Sirius. It’s foggy with years, but it plays without effort: eleven-year-old Remus, lying in bed next to Sirius in the small hours of the morning, re-buttoning his shirt over a big ugly scar. _It’s not nice,_ he said. _None of it is._

“Well,” Madam Pomfrey says, wiping her hands on the one remaining unbloodied rag, “that’ll do it.” She waves her wand and a moment later Remus is under the covers, dressed in clean pyjamas and looking for all the world like he’s just had an ordinary night of rest. “He should be up soon. I’ll be in my office if he needs anything.”

She leaves Sirius alone to sit by Remus’ bedside. He watches Remus sleep and tries not to feel too creepy about it. He’s always looked younger when he sleeps. Sirius has found this endearing in the past, but he’s incapable of feeling anything at the moment besides something he can’t name that sits heavy and breathless in his chest. It’s reminiscent of the feeling he had in Professor McGonagall’s office: this place and this chair are familiar, but this situation is one of sick dread and terrible shame and not familiar or comforting at all.

He hasn’t got to contemplate it long. A handful of minutes later, Remus’ eyelids twitch, a long sleeping breath stutters, and he flickers his eyes open to the ceiling. In spite of himself, Sirius smiles.

“Look what the cat dragged in.”

Remus’ eyes are warm and brown and sleep-cloudy when they find Sirius’. A smile lights slowly across his face. “’S’one hell of a cat,” he says, hoarse.

“Got some real claws on it.”

“I’ll say.” Remus blinks, dazed. “How…” he rasps, “…how’re you here? How’d you…” He refocuses the sleepy smile on Sirius again and mumbles, blissful: “You’re here.”

“And you’re still completely out of it.” Dopey sleep-drunk Remus is one of his favourite things in the world, but he stays businesslike. “How’re you feeling? Madam Pomfrey’s just in her office, she said to fetch her if you needed anything.”

“I’m fine,” Remus says. He’s beginning to properly gain consciousness, stretching a bit under the covers. “Sort of starving, though.”

Sirius leaps to his feet. Leaving the room is an appealing prospect. “I’ll—”

“No, no, wait.” Remus catches him by the arm. “How’d you get her to let you in?”

 _Just tell him_ , Sirius says to himself. _Just explain what happened._ But still Sirius stands there, Remus holding him by the wrist, nothing coming out of his mouth. All sound’s dried up. He sits down.

“You know,” he begins, with no idea where he intends to end up, “I’ve never been sure: how much do you remember from when you’re transformed? The next morning, I mean.”

Remus doesn’t let go of his wrist. He turns Sirius’ hand over so they’re palm-to-palm, plays absently with his fingers. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t precisely _remember_ things— there aren’t details. But sometimes I’ll wake up with some impression of what the wolf was feeling. Last night, for instance. He enjoyed himself more than usual. He likes storms, I don’t know why.”

“So, it’s…better, when he’s pleased?”

“Difficult to say. There seems to be some correlation between my mood, his mood, and how bad the moon ends up being. Why, look at me this morning—easiest one in ages, I feel better than ever.”

Sirius recalls his first impression of _red_ , a vivid snapshot in his mind. “You do?”

“Definitely. More evidence towards my theory.” Hand still pressed to his, he gives Sirius a small, meaningful smile. “Both he and I were in wonderful moods.”

Sirius drops his eyes. “But it’s never more specific than that?”

“Only rarely. But,” Remus adds, “it’s odd you ask, because I think something happened that excited him last night. It wasn’t the storm, it was… _sharper_ than that. He wanted something. I think a rabbit got in, or a bird— something he was after.”

“I did something,” Sirius says.

He doesn’t see Remus’ face when he asks, “Oh?”

“Snape,” Sirius blurts. “He was spying again. Angry about James following Lily at the party, I don’t know why he cares so much, just because nobody else can stand him—was all wounded on her behalf, as if that _excused_ —”

“I suppose James did have it coming, though,” Remus adds. “People who listen behind arrases shouldn’t be surprised when they get stabbed, and all that.”

“What?” Sirius says, but quickly moves on. “As if that were a good enough excuse to sneak around invisible and spy on people’s private conversations, trying to get them expelled!”

When he looks up at Remus again his expression has hardly changed, but something shuttered has fallen behind his eyes. “What happened?”

“He was spying, he was trying to get us all _expelled!_ ” Sirius rants. “Like he’s been doing for years! But this time he really had some nerve, he followed us after the party and heard you say that you were going down to the Entrance Hall at half past so he went and waited there until we came down and you left with Madam Pomfrey! I caught him, though,” his breath comes fast and he reminds himself to keep his voice down, “and he told me everything and how he was _so-ooo close_ this time to figuring out what we were up to and— and he talked about Regulus and asked if you and I were an item and I couldn’t _stand_ it, Moony, somebody had to do something!”

Remus moves his hand from Sirius’ to pick at the bedspread. He nods thoughtfully, as though Sirius has just explained Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration. “And you did something?”

“I told him how to get through the Willow and that he’d find all his answers there.”

For a long, long, dragging moment, Remus studies the edge of the bedspread. Then he nods. In an even voice he says, “It wasn’t a rabbit, then. Or a bird.”

“No.”

“I see.”

“But he’s alright, you didn’t touch him or anything, James went and followed after and dragged him back before he got there, so it was fine.”

Another nod. “But he did glimpse me?”

“Yeah, but Dumbledore was there and he pulled him aside to talk to him. I’ll bet a thousand Galleons he was warning him to keep his fat ugly mouth shut.”

“That’s good.”

“He’s not gonna tell, Dumbledore would expel him if he did!” Sirius insists. “So everything’s fine, yeah? No harm done.”

Remus takes a long breath in. It shakes when he lets it out. Then he says, “No harm done. You’d better be off, Sirius, it’s getting late.”

Sirius startles. “I mean, McGonagall’s the one who sent me down here, we’ve got Transfiguration first and I don’t think—”

“I’ll see you later,” Remus says. His tone is polite, but it’s a clear dismissal. An ending.

Sirius wracks his brain for something to say. Surely there’s something else he ought to say? But his head aches with exhaustion and he’s gone numb again. He stands. “Alright. See you.”

He makes it all the way back to Gryffindor Tower without seeing anybody except for a couple of indifferent ghosts. Everyone’s at breakfast, probably. As he heads up to the dormitory he feels tremendously grateful for it. He doesn’t feel like inventing an explanation, or saying anything at all.

 

***

 

It takes Madam Pomfrey about thirty seconds to fix James’ broken nose. The next morning he and Peter get dressed in silence. James feels…weird. It’s a weird morning.

“This is weird, isn’t it?” he says.

Peter tugs his head free of his robes, making his hair stick up. “You think Moony’s up yet?”

“For his sake I hope not,” James says. “Probably more merciful to put him in a coma until graduation.”

“Where’s Sirius?”

“Search me.”

“Y-you…” Peter says, worrying at the strap of his bag, “you don’t, don’t think she—”

“Nah, if he got expelled he would’ve come back for his stuff,” James says. He swings his bag over his shoulder and shoos Tesla, who’s curled up in front of the door. She meows irritably as he passes. “Probably just scared I’d murder him in his sleep.”

“Will you?”

“Strongly considering it.” They start down the stairs into the common room. “The moral thing to do is give Remus the honours, but I’m tempted.” He shakes his head and drops his voice as they join the crush toward the portrait hole. “I don’t know what we’re gonna say to Moony. Poor bastard. As if his life weren’t hard enough without…yeah, I’m gonna murder Black. Slowly.”

They take their usual spots at the Gryffindor table for breakfast but there’s no sign of Sirius. No matter what he told Peter, James is a little worried. They would know if he’d been expelled, wouldn’t they? James is pushing his eggs around on his plate, feeling whatever the exact opposite of hungry is, when he feels a nudge to the arm.

“Look,” Peter mutters, indicating the entrance to the Great Hall. James cranes his neck and immediately goes for his wand: Snape has just stalked in, looking surlier than ever. For some reason James’ temper only flares hotter when he sees Evans walking in next to him, just the bloody best of pals. He’ll never understand that, he really won’t…

“Not here, though,” Peter says. “Did you see the hourglasses this morning? Slytherin took a hit but not as big as us.”

“Fuck the House Cup. I’m gonna hex him into jelly.”

“Better to wait, though, right?” Peter suggests nervously. “When there aren’t teachers around…”

James _hmmph_ s and puts away his wand, but his eyes still follow Snape. At the Slytherin table he sees the great bat scuttle over to sit by Evans (a Gryffindor sitting with the snakes, it’s disgraceful), sees the two of them duck their heads together and confer about whatever— which of them’s a bigger prat, probably— until Snivellus looks up and notices James trying to kill him with his mind. He sneers in answer. Evans looks up, sees what’s going on, and shoots James daggers with her eyes. She tugs at Snape’s sleeve and, with a prissy swish of her stupid hair, turns him back to their conversation. James throws his fork down with a clatter.

“Ready to go?”

Peter startles mid-pour of pumpkin juice, and it slops all over his sleeve. “Er— didn’t we just sit down?”

“Whatever, I’m leaving,” James grumbles. “You coming or not?”

James is relieved beyond belief when he wanders into Transfiguration and sees Sirius in his usual chair (all four legs on the floor today), but he tries not to show it. They take their desks on either side of him; Peter dives into his bag, ostensibly looking for a quill, and leaves James to deal with it.

James crosses his arms. “Where were you, then?”

Sirius looks rough. He isn’t sitting in his usual controlled sprawl, and there are shadows under his eyes. “Hospital wing."

“Sleep at all?”

“Not especially.”

“We’re starting Vanishing today. Better buck up.”

Emerging from his bag, Peter asks, “Was that a pun?”

James doesn’t take his eyes from the front. “Shut up, Wormtail.”

After Transfiguration, James and Sirius make it all the way up to North Tower for Divination without speaking a word. They only acknowledge each other at all when the class splits up into its usual pairings; they're reviewing tea leaves today. It's James' turn to stare into the grainy dregs in Sirius’ teacup and try to make sense of them.

"Well,” he says, "that bit right there is sort of...round. That means—” He flips a page in his textbook at random, “betrayal."

"That can't be what 'round' means.” Sirius makes to read the book over James' shoulder. "Are you sure you're—”

"And here," James continues, "that right there— that means the destruction of trust."

"I dunno what you're looking at mate, but—”

James barely glances into the cup. “And see, right there, that _definitely_ portends the betrayal of a trust given to you by a friend which ends up making that friend miserable and nearly forcing him to kill somebody."

Sirius snatches back his teacup. "Fuck off."

"You really fucking amaze me sometimes, you know that?" James whispers, unable to keep it in anymore. “What were you thinking? _Were_ you thinking?"

"I don't know what the big deal is.” Sirius slumps forward in his chair, hair falling over his face, shoulders curved in defensively. It’s not like him at all, and it looks odd. “It was _Snape_. Who cares?”

"Are you even hearing yourself? You sound like a, a—”

"A what?"

"Merlin, I don't even know,” James hisses. “I don't know what kind of person wouldn't care about almost _killing somebody_ , even if it did happen to be the most annoying person on the planet! I don't know how you can be so… _unfeeling_ about all of this.”

Sirius tips his head up, a defiant set to his mouth. “So you're taking his side, then?"

“This isn't about _sides_ , it’s about what you almost did to Moony! God, why am I even saying 'almost’— that slithery bastard knows now, and it's your fault!"

Sirius glares down into his teacup, settling into sulky silence again. James turns back to his book, pretends to be busy. Then he hears Sirius say, in an odd voice, “What, so you hate me now?"

James pushes under his glasses with the heels of his hands. He rubs his eyes, deeply exhausted in a way that might not be entirely to do with the long night. “We're best friends, Black. That's not any different.” He sighs. “But yeah, I do hate you at the moment. Probably will for a bit yet. Get used to it."

They go back to ignoring each other for the rest of the lesson.

So James is already in a pretty foul mood when he stomps his way down towards the Great Hall for lunch (alone, as Sirius seemed to dematerialise the second they left the classroom). As he pushes through the pre-lunch crowd in the second floor corridor, stopping to hex a couple of fourth year slow-walkers, he spots a group of his friends, because he _has_ got friends who aren’t Remus or Peter or that arrogant, girly-haired bastard who he refuses to think about, thank you very much. It’s Dirk Cresswell’s lot, with Casey and Marco and Davey and them, none of whom have ever tried to kill anybody as far as James knows, so he makes his way over. A second later, though, Casey points his wand at Davey who goes flying up into the air by the ankle, and oh Merlin, James _knows_ that spell.

“OY!” James calls across the corridor. He elbows a Ravenclaw out of the way until he’s in earshot. “Jordan! Where’d you get that spell from, eh?”

All of them laugh. Casey shouts, “Wouldn’t you like to know, Potter?” Then he turns his wand on James and says an incantation he can’t hear, and James gets pulled up by the fucking ankle again.

He hangs there for a minute, cursing loquaciously while his _supposed_ mates laugh their heads off. It’s official, he hasn’t got any friends in this whole godforsaken castle. Without warning he goes crashing to the floor, and when he disentangles himself from his robes again he’s looking up into Florence’s face, which is unusually serious.

“Thanks,” he says, getting to his feet. He scrubs a hand through his hair before looping his arm around her waist and proclaiming, “You’re the only one I can count on round here.”

They start down the corridor together. She smiles wryly, looking a bit more like her normal self. “I hear you’re— er— familiar with that spell?”

James stops dead. “You ‘hear’? Does that mean—”

“That the whole school’s heard about how you crashed Slughorn’s party in drag, spied on Lily, and showed off your knickers to all the important guests?” she suggests. “I’m afraid so. Everybody’s picked up the spell pretty quickly.”

“Don’t know why it’s so funny. Partial nudity has always been my MO. If anybody round here wants to see me in my pants all they’ve got to do is _ask_.”

He expects her to riff back, like she always does, but Florence frowns. “I did want to ask you about that. Not with everybody around though— er—” She casts a glance up and down the corridor. “This’ll do,” she says, and tugs him over to the out of order girl’s bathroom. She shuts the door behind them. Predictably, it’s empty.

“Y’know, I’ve never been in here before,” James says, looking around at the gloomy place. “Well, there was that time me and Sirius— third year, I think it was—”

“What happened last night?” Florence leans back against a chipped sink, crosses her arms. Brown eyes narrowed, she says, “People are saying the maddest stuff.”

“I dunno what’s so mad about it. We crashed the party, I’m dead sexy as a bird, Evans is the worst, end of story.”

“Everybody’s saying that something happened after the party, later that night.”

James freezes. “Yeah? What’re they saying?”

“I only know what _I_ heard, I dunno what else is going round,” she says, tucking a loose curl behind her ear in a thoughtful sort of way. “Lorraine said that Hazel went in to see Madam Pomfrey before breakfast this morning because she didn’t want to miss practise again, she’s still got that thing with her wrist, but— anyway. She said she saw Sirius leaving the hospital wing.”

“So? Probably breathed in the direction of something sharp and had to get his blood stopped up.”

“But Hazel mentioned it to Marianne,” Florence goes on, “who said that she and Vera were up most the night in the common room doing some Ancient Runes thing, and Marianne saw Sirius _leave_ the common room that night but never saw him come back in, and of course Marianne’d notice because—”

“Because she thinks the sun shines out Black’s arse, right.”

“Yeah. And then Vera said that Shirley Warrington was telling _her_ how she and half of Slytherin got woken up at some hour in the morning by Severus Snape throwing a tantrum and smashing a bunch of stuff in the common room—”

“But…hang on, Vera told you what?” Though James frequently finds himself the subject of gossip, he’s never been good at it himself.

Florence rolls her eyes. She summarises: “Everybody’s saying that something happened with Sirius and Snape last night, and I saw you nodding off in Transfiguration. And don’t think the whole House hasn’t noticed the state of the hourglass. People are pretty brassed off about that.”

 _Uh oh_ , James thinks. “Er,” he says.

Florence raises her eyebrows. “So...something did happen, then?”

“No,” he says, too quickly. “Reckon Snape was just throwing a hissy because he’s ugly and nobody likes him.”

She turns to fiddle absently with the broken tap, twisting one of the rusted knobs back and forth. “I get it, you haven’t got to tell me everything. I know when to mind my business.”

“There’s a shortage of that round here,” James mumbles.

“How d’you mean?”

Sirius and Snape immediately come to mind, but Florence can’t know that. “Evans, for a start,” he says.

She looks up, eyebrow quirked. “A bit hypocritical, don’t you reckon?”

He can’t _believe_ this. “What, so I get laughed at by the whole school for— for _investigating_ one time, but she’s the biggest busybody ever and everybody adores her?”

“Lily’s a gossip, but she doesn’t spy on people. There’s a difference.”

“Yeah, whatever.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and paces, irritable. How is it that every conversation has always got to lead to perfect, prissy Lily Evans?

“That’s the other thing I wanted to ask about,” Florence says.

“What?”

“What were you spying on Lily for?”

James vents his feelings on a frustrated groan to the ceiling. “Because everybody thinks she’s so _perfect_ —”

“Nobody said she was perfect, you’re the only one who’s ever said that—”

“—and catching her doing something dodgy would’ve been so great because I’ve known all along that she’s dodgy, and nosy, and awful!”

“I don’t know why you’ve got to be such a drag about her all the time. You’re always picking on her.”

“ _I_ pick on _her?_ She’s the one who picks on me!”

“Oh, quit being dramatic!” Florence exclaims, pushing off from the sink to stand in front of him. “She barely speaks to you, she ignores you as best she can— she _tells_ me she does— but you go out of your way to provoke her! I really don’t know what your problem is!”

“My problem is her!” James cries. “Nobody else sees how terrible she is and it drives me mad!”

“She’s my friend, you know,” Florence fires back, hands on her hips. “I don’t much appreciate you talking about my friends like that.”

“Well, maybe you ought to get better friends!”

He knows he’s messed up the second it’s out of his mouth.

“That’s great, James,” she says icily. “Really classy. What about your friends, eh? They’re no angels either but I never say a word about it, because that— it— it’s just really not on!”

“Sounds like you’ve got something to say!” James shouts. “Better go on and say it, then!”

“I know something bad happened with Black and Snape last night! And I know it was something bad, _everybody_ knows— lost us all the points we won against Ravenclaw, whatever it was— and you haven’t got to tell me everything about your life, James, just tell me you don’t want to talk about it and I’ll drop it, but I hate it when you lie to me! I feel like shit when you lie to me, I really do!”

“I’m not lying! Look, nothing—”

“Just— don’t. Don’t bother.” She hooks her hands at the back of her neck and tilts her head back, something she does when she’s well and truly irritated at him. “Merlin, I see what Jeanette meant, two years ago she said it…”

That throws him. “What’s Jeanette got to do with it?”

“You lot.” She lets her arms drop back to her sides. “You’re… _impossible_.”

“Impossible?”

“The four of you,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re impossible to date because nobody on the outside has any bloody clue what’s going on in that little gang of yours. And there’s always something going on, Merlin knows what, everybody can tell you’re up to your eyes in secrets! All four of you, you’re just…impossible.”

James doesn’t know what to say to that.

 

***

 

“…and then she said we’ve been ‘growing apart’ and all this other nonsense, then she took off and left me there,” James complains. “Moaning Myrtle laughed at me. _Moaning Myrtle_ thinks I’m pathetic.”

“Had you?” asks Peter. He and James are crossing to the Great Hall with the rest of the mealtime crowd. “Been growing apart, I mean.”

“I guess. Still, I get the feeling she was only ending it amicably to keep things from getting awkward in the Quidditch team.”

“How d’you reckon that?”

Out of the corner of his eye, James sees somebody on the far side of the hall get pulled up into the air by the ankle. Bollocks, it really is spreading. “Because she said the words, ‘I’m ending it amicably to keep things from getting awkward in the Quidditch team’.”

“Oh, er, well, yeah, you’re probably right.”

“I can’t believe she’d dump me _now_ ,” James moans. “She couldn’t’ve waited till after Saturday? We’re playing Hufflepuff and they’ve got an excellent lineup this year, I’ve got to admit. That’s Seekers for you— so self-centred.”

“Er.” Peter pulls back to avoid being trampled by the large seventh year shoving in front of them. James flicks his wand and Jelly-Legs Jinxes the kid, waits for him to topple to the floor, and walks him and Peter around. “You don’t seem very upset,” Peter says.

They pass into the bustling Great Hall and James musses his own hair absently. Truth be told, he’s surprised he isn’t more upset. He’s sad, of course he is, and rather disoriented, but…he and Florence were together for almost a _year_. Knowing himself, he should be inconsolable right now. He’s not, though. He shrugs.

“Distracted, I guess. Got enough to worry about at the moment. You think he’s gonna show up?”

Sirius doesn’t show up. He’s missing all throughout lunch, and doesn’t appear as they slosh en-masse through the mud toward Herbology with the Ravenclaws. Must be skiving off to sulk someplace, James reckons. Well, it’s all the same to James. If Sirius were here, he doesn’t know if he could trust himself not to cave his head in with a watering can.

“Y’know,” James says to Peter as they fertilise potted Screechsnap seedlings with dragon dung, “for a bloke who refuses to admit he’s done anything wrong he sure is hiding a lot.”

“I guess he isn’t ready to admit it yet.”

“No, he’s just more full of shite than these pots.”

“Amounts to the same thing, I reckon.”

With a _hmph_ James takes up his pruning shears and begins aggressively snipping at their Screechsnaps, which squeak in annoyance. This is the worst day he’s had in…well, ever, probably, and he feels angry and frustrated and scared shitless. He knows that he and Peter will go to see Remus after lessons are done to catch him up on what he’s missed, like they always do. The thought makes him want to hide in a ditch and never come out. What’re they going to say to him? What _can_ they say? He doesn’t think Sirius will have the gall to show up for that, but boy, if he does…James chops off a twig from the seedling in front of him with a lot more force than necessary.

As the lesson drags on James finds more and more things to be angry at. He’s angry at Florence, who’s at the other end of the table dumping fertiliser into pots with Hazel, happy as a clam. Merlin, they were together for almost a year, she couldn’t at least _pretend_ to be sad? He’s angry at Peter, who’s studiously ignoring James’ existence. He’s angry at these stupid squeaky plants and at the weather for being muddy and humid and— he casts a glance around the greenhouse, looking for more things to hate— and, oh yeah, he’s really, _really_ angry at nosy, irritating, un-bloody-bearable Lily Evans.

There she is, right in his line of sight, partnered with Rodney Stebbins and pruning a Screechsnap in an _incredibly_ smug fashion. Everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours, it occurs to James, is her fault. If she hadn’t been creeping about being dodgy and bullying Alice Higgs into letting her into some sort of secret club, James wouldn’t have had to work out what was going on, and if he hadn’t had to do that then Snape wouldn’t have gotten all righteously indignant about it, and if Snape hadn’t had to stick his big greasy nose where it didn’t belong Sirius wouldn’t have pulled the most profound fuck-up of his long and prolific career as a fuck-up. If Lily Busybody Evans hadn’t stirred up trouble at Slughorn’s party James would still have a girlfriend, he wouldn’t be the joke of the school for inspiring the latest new jinx that’s sweeping the castle, and, most of all, _Snivellus wouldn’t know that Remus is a fucking werewolf._

Merlin, James hates her. He watches her twist up her ugly shiny hair and pin it through with her wand and meditates on how much he hates her. Florence asked what his ‘problem’ was, as if _he_ were the one with the problem! The others always used to accuse him of being ‘obsessed’ with her, or whatever, but that’s just because he hates her so bloody much. He hates her because oh, doesn’t everyone just _love_ Lily Evans, cleverest girl in the year and mouthy as hell to professors but charismatic enough that they love her anyway, popular and pretty Lily Evans with all her damn _charm_ and her stupid _eyes—_ who has green eyes, anyway? Nobody, that’s who. Nobody has eyes like that, it’s probably a sign of how evil she is, or something. And her stupid _face_ and how she’s always got to look, like, _elegant_ or whatever, even in their boring school robes. They’re boring for a reason! Being _pretty_ in them is highly inappropriate, especially for a prefect, Merlin, she’s such a bloody hypocrite.

James moves around seedling pots at random, busying his hands while he continues to concentrate all the force of his hatred onto Lily Perfect Evans. She says something to Stebbins that makes him laugh, oh, sure, she’s so bloody funny, isn’t that just typical! Perfect Lily Evans and her _wit_ , oh sure, and then James remembers what Florence said about how nobody else had called her ‘perfect’ and he was the only one who kept using that word, and, well, yeah, maybe they don’t say it out loud, but they’ve all got to be thinking it! Because she _is_ perfect, in the most annoying way, she’s so perfect it makes his stomach hurt—

James hears the smash of breaking pottery a good few seconds before realising that he’s just dropped a Screechsnap pot. People turn round to look, but he barely notices.

“Merlin’s silky underthings,” he says to himself. “Not again.”

Peter gives him a concerned look. “You alright?”

James almost laughs. He doesn’t, though, just stands there rooted to the spot and curses the day he was born.

“Not a bit of it, Pete,” he says, scrubbing a hand through his hair and realising too late that he’s just run it through with dragon shite. “Not a bit.”

 

***

 

“He looked good, didn’t he?” James says around a mouthful of chicken. “His colour was good. Better than usual, anyway.”

Sirius sits up. He’d been slumped against his elbow, stabbing at his potatoes with his fork. It’s Tuesday evening. “Moony’s back?”

“Yeah, since last period. He showed up right on time for Arithmancy,” Peter answers. “You haven’t seen him?”

“No.”

“I expect he’s in the kitchens,” James says, pointedly directed at Peter and not Sirius. “Probably didn’t feel like dealing with the crowd.”

Sirius hears the subtext in that: ‘didn’t feel like facing Snape’. Still, though, Sirius has a feeling— an instinct, maybe— that Remus isn’t in the kitchens.

When Sirius stands James doesn’t bother asking where he’s going. Eyes narrowed, he lowers his voice and says, “I reckon you ought to leave him alone.”

Sirius’ temper flares at that, but he shoves it down. “I reckon you ought to mind your own business,” he says. He leaves.

It would make sense to go looking for him in the kitchens, James was right about that; that’s where he goes when he’s too moony to deal with the racket and bright light of the Great Hall. But when Sirius hits the Entrance Hall he doesn’t take the doorway down to the dungeons, instead going for the stairs. He reaches the fourth floor and makes for the library, and across the deserted corridor he sees the full-length mirror. Sirius pulls it open and slides down into the dimness.

The sun’s already gone down, so there’s no light coming in from the tiny windows around the ceiling of the passageway. All illumination in the place emanates from a glass jar containing a tongue of blue fire, floating in the air off to the side of the chamber. Sitting below it is Remus, propped against the wall with a book in his lap. The flames throw deep, bluish shadows across his tired face.

“Bit dark in here to read, isn’t it?” Sirius asks. He points his wand at the floating jar. “ _Geminio_.” Two more jars of blue fire pop into existence, floating alongside the first. The chamber is saturated in wavering blue.

Remus peers up at the jars. “You got the fire to duplicate as well. Very impressive.”

“Got pretty good at that spell second year.”

“I remember.”

Sirius feels uncomfortable. He looks around. “Bit like sitting at the bottom of a fish tank, isn’t it?”

“What can I do for you, Sirius?”

Remus’ tone is formal. It doesn’t bode well.

“I just wanted to talk about what happened.”

“Alright.” Remus shuts his book. “Talk.”

Sirius stands in the middle of the chamber, looking down at Remus’ carefully even expression, and has never felt less eloquent in his life. He decides he ought to dive right in. “He’d been spying on us for ages, years. He’s a dirty sneak.”

“So you figured that he deserved to die for it. How reasonable.”

“‘Die’, why do people keep saying ‘die’? Werewolves bite people, they don’t just maul them, right? I mean, you lived and you were just a little kid.”

“The werewolf that attacked me hadn’t been locked up with no prey to chase for ten years. It was a bit of a different situation.”

“You wouldn’t’ve killed him!” Sirius insists. “You just would’ve made him like you! Isn’t there poetic justice in that— Death Eater scum with all his prejudice, made to walk in your shoes?”

Remus’ voice is very quiet: “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, Sirius.”

Sirius is out of words.

Remus sighs a sigh that’s familiar, the one that sounds wrong coming from a sixteen-year-old. He pushes his hair out of his eyes and says, “And yes, I would’ve killed him. You know that— you’ve seen firsthand what I look like after the moon. Madam Pomfrey told me you’ve seen.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Sirius says, defensive. “McGonagall wanted me to be there when you woke up so I could tell you, so it just happened that I was there when Pomfrey brought you in.” The words are hardly out before he realises how thick he’s been. “That wasn’t a coincidence, was it?”

“No, I don’t imagine it was.”

Sirius thinks out loud. “She wanted me to see.”

“And why do you think that was?” Remus asks in that professorial tone, the one he picked up from his secondary school teacher mum. Or maybe he comes by it naturally, a product of always being older than he’s supposed to be.

“She…she wanted me to take it seriously, I suppose. Or…I dunno. Teach me empathy.”

“How nice,” Remus says flatly. “Did it work?”

When Sirius doesn’t say anything, just stands there feeling useless and confused, Remus continues in the formal tone from before: “It may have been inevitable, something like this happening. I’m grateful that it turned out to be as inconsequential as it was. I didn’t hurt anyone; it could’ve been much, much worse. I must be grateful.”

 _Grateful?_ Who would be grateful, given Remus’ lot in life? “Moony, that…that’s not—”

“But I’m not happy with you,” Remus says, staring at his hands folded on his knees with heavy, tired eyes. “What you did, the responsibility you nearly put on me…I would’ve killed him. Someone would be dead, and it would be my fault.”

“No it wouldn’t! It wouldn’t be your fault at all, it’d be mine! I’d go down for it, not you, I’d take all the blame—” Feeling increasingly hysterical, Sirius says what’s sort of a joke and sort of not: “I’ll kill him for you, I don’t mind!”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Remus gets to his feet, bats one of the floating jars away, and crosses the chamber toward the exit. Heart in his throat, Sirius chases after him, catches him by the arm, lands a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, wait—”

Remus pushes his hands away. “Don’t.”

“What, I, I can’t—?”

Sirius doesn’t know what he’s asking, but Remus answers anyway: “No, I’m sorry.”

“Alright, I…”

But Remus won’t look at him. He turns away, a hand going to pull fretfully through his hair. “Of all the people in the world,” he mumbles, “it had to be you. I could’ve handled it from anybody, _anybody_ else. Why’d it have to be you?”

Sirius has never been punched in the stomach. He imagines it’d hurt less. “Can I…can I just—”

“I’ve been thinking,” Remus says. He’s standing up straight again, he’s got his composure back, but he still won't look at him. “This relationship that we’ve got— I think it’s run its course.”

Sirius becomes very aware of his body, as though he were inside it, looking out.

“Run its course?” 

“Yes, I think so,” Remus says, polite. “I think it’s time we ended it. It’d be better for everybody, in the long run.”

Maybe it’s the unearthly blue light, swimming dizzily the way it had the time they listened to a record and spilled their guts down here, like it had up on the Astronomy Tower the night Remus first kissed him, but Sirius has the sensation of being suspended, floating. He says, “I don’t want to end it.”

“I’m sorry, but you already have.”

It’s as if Sirius were expecting something else to happen. It’s as if this is the part where the world comes crashing down around him, and the world is missing its cue. Disorienting, anticlimactic. He and Remus stare at each other, blinking, saying nothing.

“So...what?" Sirius hears himself ask. "We just...go back to being friends?”

“We’ve always been friends. No matter what else we’ve been to each other, we’ve _always_ been friends. That’s never changed.”

Standing there with his arms hanging limply at his sides in a room that’s gone airless, Sirius has never felt less like a cool, clever, popular Gryffindor. He feels small and stupid and helpless. The voice at the core of his being that says _go, fight, fight back_ is smothered. It’s over, all’s lost, fighting will do nothing. Nothing he can do, nothing, nothing…But still it sounds like a challenge when Sirius bites out, “I love you.”

Remus looks at him, then he doesn’t. He runs a hand over his face, paces.

“And not the way I love Peter or James,” Sirius barks. “So no playing dumb and pretending you don’t know what—”

He stops a ways away from Sirius, hand over his eyes. “I know what you meant.”

“You just don’t give a shit.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Nah, you didn’t say anything, that’s worse.”

“I haven’t got anything to say.” It’s muffled behind his hand.

“Try looking at me for a start, then!”

In a very small voice, Remus tells his hand, “No, I don’t want to.”

“Well, great. Real mature, Moony. What do you want from me, huh?”

The second hand creeps up over Remus’ face, his head bowed; they knot themselves into his fringe and pull. “I don’t know,” he mumbles, weak. “Maybe…maybe an apology? I don’t know, I…”

“Fine, I’m sorry!” It echoes in the chamber. “There, I’m sorry, alright? That good enough?”

Remus resurfaces. He doesn’t look calm anymore— he looks unhinged, and his voice is broken and strangled. “But you’re not really, are you? That’s the problem. There’s a part of you that will always be incapable of being sorry, because there’s a part of you that’s been there as long as I’ve known you that thinks hurting people is fun. There’s always going to be a part of you that’s violent and malicious and—and cruel.”

A second punch to the stomach. The muscles in Sirius’ face spasm and he fights to keep his mouth from trembling, he feels a hardness form in his throat. “Shut up.”

“Do you think I like saying that?” Remus cries, striding up to him with wild eyes. “It _hurts_ me to say that! But I’ve got to, because I’ve got to come to terms with just what sort of a person you are before I _somehow_ get deeper in this!”

“And what’s that?” Sirius tries to sound harsh but his voice gives out and cracks, buckling under the weight. “What sort of person’s that?”

“Not a good one.”

It hurts too much to be real. In a mercilessly unmetaphorical way it’s agony, like his ribs would snap under the pressure. They never tell you to expect that, how _literal_ it is. They never tell you how you’ll take it like a Blasting Jinx to the gut, all the wind knocked out of you. You feel it yourself at fifteen, and you think _oh, this is what they meant_.

“Fine,” Sirius pants. He comes up for air. He can’t breathe. “Yeah, fine, whatever, forget I mentioned it.”

Remus takes a step toward him with his hands raised, as if he’d reach out but can’t quite commit to it. “I don’t—”

“Nah, really, don’t mention it.” Sirius stalks over to the slide, waits for it to ripple into stairs. “See you around, _pal_.”

He hears Remus shout after him as he climbs the stairs higher and higher, but eventually his voice fades away with the blue light. When Sirius reaches the top he throws open the mirror so hard that it smacks into the stone wall opposite with an ominous _crunch_. He swings it shut behind him.

There’s a long crack forked across the glass. It slices diagonally through Sirius’ face in the mirror, distorting it. For a moment he can do nothing but stare down his reflection: stunned, paler even than usual, split down the middle. Then, without his moving a muscle, the sound of breaking glass rings through the corridor as the whole mirror shatters. It crumbles into a thousand shards, a pile of glittering dust on the floor, and leaves a blank slab of wood behind.

It takes Sirius a second to figure out what happened, though it shouldn’t. He breaks things. He can’t help it.

Glass crunching under his shoes, he leaves.

 

***

 

 


	2. indiscreet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Right before that James said that it was Sirius’ fault. That this moon was so bad, I mean.”
> 
> “Bet he loved that.”
> 
> “He didn’t argue.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back, gang!
> 
> I want to sincerely apologize for the hiatus. Lots of people reached out and asked (always super kindly!) if atyd had been abandoned, but the truth is I had personal stuff to deal with, work and otherwise. I couldn't find the energy to keep it up, especially in this toughest part of the story. But I've been forming this fic in my head since I was sixteen-- I'm not giving up on it anytime soon! The plan is to return to a regular update schedule.
> 
> I also want to apologize for not responding to each wonderful, lovely comment this fic gets. I confess I get weirdly internet-shy, and I worry people will think I'm trying to artificially inflate the comment count by responding. I read each and every one of them, and they make my week. I'm always happy to chat on tumblr; I don't publish asks about it on my main blog, but I gladly will on my side blog, okayinarcadia, if you ever have questions or just want to say hi.
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who's read this far. You don't know what it means to me that I get to share this with you.

 

 

***

 

“I don’t know how to look at him anymore.”

Peter doesn’t ask who James means. He hums.

“Who could do that, you know? I wouldn’t’ve thought he could.” James adjusts the strap of his bag on his shoulder, sigh lost to the racket of the crowded corridor. His heart isn’t really in the conversation; over the past two weeks, it’s become well-trodden territory. “Thought I knew everything about him. Being _surprised_ is…”

“Unsettling?” Peter suggests.

James shrugs. “I dunno how I feel. Let me know if you work it out.” He glances past Peter’s shoulder and fixes his honest, elastic face into something casual and unconvincing. “Hey.”

Remus has materialized beside them. “Hi.”

“You just come from Magical Creatures?”

“Yeah,” says Remus, answering the question James actually asked by picking up their pace through the crowd. It backfires: he nearly collides with Sirius, turning the corner from the other direction.

“Hi,” Sirius says.

James tugs on Remus’ and Peter’s elbow, pretends Sirius is an oddly-shaped suit of armour. “Two minutes to get to the dungeons, come on…”

Peter watches Sirius’ face do something funny. Sirius’ eyes land on something on the other side of the corridor, he pulls out his wand, and calls out, “Think fast, Snivellus! _Expelliarmus!_ ”

Peter turns around. He hadn’t even seen Snape among the crush of black robes until half a dozen books flying into the air point him out. The books come falling back to earth with a clatter, knocking Snape down with them. A lot of people laugh, among them James, who seems to forget that he’s ignoring his best friend as he steps forward next to him, wand drawn.

“Walk much, Snivelly?” James says, elbow-to-elbow with Sirius. Traffic has slowed to a stop in the corridor. People watch as the show begins: Snape sprawled on the floor and scrambling for his things, James pointing his wand and saying, “ _Impedimenta._ ”

The spell doesn’t land. Lily Evans lowers her wand, whisking away the Shield Charm she’d cast, and kneels to help Snape gather his books. Peter only just catches the expression that flickers over James’ face.

Lily shoots daggers with her eyes. “Very funny,” she says, icy. Snape staggers to his feet, steps toward James and Sirius, wand raised and eyes flashing, but falls silent when Lily takes him by the arm.

“C’mon, Sev.”

With one last sharp look, she leads them away through the laughing crowd. James scrubs a hand through his hair, dignified. “Will never understand that. Really won’t.”

“One of life’s great mysteries,” Sirius agrees.

That’s about when James seems to realise who he’s standing next to. He pockets his wand, turns on his heel, and says— pointedly to Peter and Remus only— “Potions, lads, shake a leg.” He marches off. Sirius follows him, sour-faced.

Peter doesn’t move. Neither does Remus, who turns to him and says, “Are you noticing a pattern developing?”

Peter frowns. “A bit.”

“It’s…” The space between Remus’ eyebrows scrunches up. He has a way of looking older than he is when he does that. He does it a lot lately. “…troubling.”

“You mean Sirius trying to earn back James’ friendship by torturing Snape?”

“I do.”

“Not so out of the ordinary, is it?”

“It’s worse than it was,” Remus says vaguely. “It won’t end well.”

“I wouldn’t think you of all people would feel sorry for Snape these days.”

He knows immediately he’s taken it too far; Remus shoots him a look. “That wasn’t his fault.”

“Sort of was.”

“It was Sirius’.” Remus starts walking, jaw set, eyes forward. “Nobody else’s.”

They head off toward the dungeons, and Peter fumbles desperately for a change of topic. “Gives James more opportunity to complain about Lily, at least.”

Remus rolls his eyes. “As if he ever needed an excuse to do that.”

And complain he does. It’s a topic James comes back to that night in the Shrieking Shack, where they’re assembled after performing the pre-transformation new moon ritual. Again.

(Peter knows he’s not the only one who’s gotten tired of it. Sirius goes through his incantation periodically rolling his eyes; James, impatient, nearly ruins the whole thing by taking the cauldron off the fire far too early. None of them, it seems, are thrilled at the prospect of doing the whole spell all over again, especially when Sirius and James struggle to be in the same room together.)

“What’s even the appeal there, d’you think?” James muses after they’re finished. He gives the spent potion an aimless stir. “Like, why’s she hang round him anyway? She knows he’s Death Eater Youth scum by now, she’s _got_ to, right? Remember that time we threatened him by saying we’d tell her? What a crock. She’s got to know by now.”

“Probably,” Remus says, polite, obviously bored.

“Somebody like her, friends with one of them! And not just the Muggle-born thing, I mean— she’s so _political_ , y’know? Really got her mind plugged into that stuff, all the goings-on and things, and not in their favour, so, y’know, what even’s the _appeal?_ ”

Peter hums. Sirius peels ripped upholstery off of the sofa in strips, listless.

“He could be the most politically moral bloke alive and still be an ugly, oily little creep,” James says, working himself into one of his righteous indignations. “I almost punched him for that thing in Potions earlier, Merlin’s honest. Forget magic, just chucked my wand and decked him right in the nose.”

Peter stifles a laugh. He rather shares the sentiment. Though Snape seems to be keeping his (forced) word to Dumbledore and not directly telling anybody Remus’ secret, he’s doing his best to taunt them all with the threat of it. This afternoon’s was a little more obvious than usual after the altercation in the corridor, but not much: when Slughorn explained that asphodel used in a Calming Draught has got to be picked under a waning moon, Snape wasted no time in turning round in his seat and loudly asking Remus if he knew what lunar phase it was.

“Could be worse,” Remus says. “Let’s be grateful all he does is drop hints.”

“Only cause Dumbledore would expel him if he told!”

“I nearly killed him, but he’s keeping my secret anyway. I don’t especially care why.”

Groaning, James flops backwards onto the dangerously rickety sofa. “You make me sick. Saint Moony! Won’t even properly hate who he ought to!”

Remus actually smiles at that. “Reckon you hate him enough for both of us, Prongs. It’s good of you. Saves me the trouble.”

Sirius, who’s been saying little all night, scoffs. “Don’t think there’s such thing as hating him _enough_. Deserves all the hatred he can get.”

Remus turns sharply to Sirius, retort on his lips. Then he shuts his mouth, lets his face go blank. Nods. He looks away from Sirius. “That ought to do it for tonight. You can leave if you like, Padfoot, we’ll clean up.”

James tries to say something, but Sirius is already stomping to his feet. He kicks away the crate blocking the entrance so hard that it flies across the tiny room and smacks against the hearth. Then, without acknowledging any of them, he drops down into the passageway.

Peter feels uncomfortable. He looks over at James, who gives a frantic little shrug and mimes holding up a noose and hanging himself. Meanwhile Remus makes a show of pretending not to notice, stowing the cauldron neatly in its safe spot in the cupboard in the corner.

It’s bad enough, the perverseness that is James and Sirius not speaking. At least that’s easy enough for Peter to wrap his head around. Whatever odd dance Sirius and Remus are performing in the wake of _the incident_ , though, is beyond him. Sure, it’s no mystery what happened to drive them apart— trying to use your friend as a murder weapon isn’t gonna go over well, even between the closest mates— but even so, they’ve been…strange.

Why is Sirius so prone to these little outbursts of temper lately? Sure he _gets_ why Remus is upset with him. Him being angry at Remus after what happened, when all logic dictates the opposite, makes no sense at all. Then again, Peter knows Sirius well enough to realise that such behaviours from him don’t necessarily indicate that he’s angry, the way they would with other people. A bunch of different emotions look like anger on him: a hurt, threatened, or humiliated Sirius is every bit as like a lit grenade as an angry one is, Snape proved that.

Sort of impressive, Peter reflects as they crouch through the tunnel, how often Snape hits every single sore spot that James and Sirius possess. James hates Snape because Lily likes him better, everybody knows that. And from what Peter learned of their fight in the Entrance Hall that night, it sounds like Snape managed to press on every metaphorical bruise Sirius has got, whether or not he knew it.

He mocked him for his family, when it’s no secret that Sirius loathes everything about looking and speaking and bleeding like a Black. And he talked about Regulus, provoked him unknowingly with a crime against his little brother that Sirius thinks he committed. Oh, but if Sirius only knew the truth about that…

Peter swallows down the burning hot guilt. It’ll do him no good now.

He remembers what else Sirius told him in that frenzied midnight conversation in the dormitory, what else Snape said. Peter doubts that Snape realised the minefield he was stomping into by calling Sirius ‘pretty’, by implying he liked boys.

By implying he liked Remus.

Peter tries to redirect his thoughts, focusing instead on not hitting his head on low-hanging roots. It’s not his business.

But he’s….wondered, before. Every once in a while. He’s wondered about Sirius and what he himself confirmed to Peter that night, and the indefinable way Sirius has always been with Remus, a way that Peter has sensed but has never been able to quantify or name. It’s hard to explain.

Maybe it comes down to what it’s like to be alone with the two of them, as compared to, for instance, Sirius and James. Since the day they met, Sirius and James have had the dynamic of siblings (the theoretical siblings of the expression “like brothers”, since Sirius’ relationship with Regulus proves the reality to be less nice). That’s the sort of thing they’ve got: twinlike, action-and-reaction. But even though it’s sometimes hard to tell where one stops and the other starts, you don’t feel singled out when you’re with them. It’s easy to fit into The James and Sirius Show, their energy is expansive and inclusive and simple to understand.

Sirius and Remus…aren’t like that. They don’t blend into each other like Hogwarts’ wonder duo does. Their opposite personalities stay opposite when they’re together and the negative space is strange to occupy if you happen to land in the middle of it, in a way that makes Peter think about terminals in a battery, or particles in an atom. Charged by opposites. They aren’t conjoined at the hip like Sirius and James are but you’re more likely to feel miscellaneous in their presence, like there’s something complex they know that you don’t and you’re several steps behind. Peter’s never seen a dynamic like theirs between teenage boys. Between anyone, really.

It doesn’t mean anything. But, if it did…

Peter wonders what Remus would think if he knew. If it were true at all. Which it probably isn’t. Peter would never presume to know what Sirius feels, nor would he think at length about things that aren’t his business to think about. Sirius’ feelings, whatever they are, are his. And that’s that.

Still. He wonders.

 

***

 

“Moony?”

He stops in the threshold, on his way out of the dormitory. “Mm?”

Not asking the question he really means to ask, Peter says, “Can you tell beforehand, how bad a moon will be?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering…” He doesn’t stutter, but his hands, wringing together in his lap, give him away. “That theory of yours?”

Remus knows what he means. It must be some misplaced vindictive streak, then, that makes him ask, “Which one’s that?”

“That the wolf hurts you less when— when you’re in a better mood?”

Remus shrugs. “Just a theory.”

Peter nods. “Right.”

“Have a good night.”

“You too. I guess.”

Remus heads off to the Entrance Hall to meet Madam Pomfrey. He hears the warning from his joints, aching so badly he can hardly make it down the stairs, and thinks that he really is the worst sort of liar.

 

***

 

Sirius stands up. "I'm skiving off."

James grabs him by the arm and forces him back into his chair. “Too late.”

"Flitwick's not here yet, I can still—”

The door opens and Professor Flitwick walks in, offering the smattering of Gryffindors and Slytherins already in their seats a friendly wave. Sirius scowls.

“Fat lot of good it'd do anyway,” James points out. “You sitting there staring at him won't make him wake up any faster."

"It's _two o'clock._ He's never been out this long! Even after the worst ones, he’s always awake and talking by lunch!"

"He had bad moons before, though," Peter says tentatively. Too nervous to look Sirius in the face, he fiddles with the cover of his textbook. Charms is the last lesson of the day and still the air is heavy with the tension from earlier, when they’d gone to the hospital wing around noon only to be told by Madam Pomfrey that Remus was hours away from gaining consciousness."Maybe it's just a coincidence?”

"Go be thick somewhere else," Sirius hisses. "You damn well know why this one's worse."

“And seeing as it's your fault, I reckon you ought not to take it out on Wormtail,” James says coldly. Sirius flushes, crosses his arms, and stares sulkily at the floor.

Peter tries again, this time addressing James. "So... you think it's true, then?"

"That being miserable for a month makes him damn near claw himself to death come full?" James says. "Yeah, I reckon it is."

"D'you think he'll be up after class is done?"

"Do I look like I know?” James crosses his arms, a mirror of Sirius still glowering at the floor next to him. "I hate this. I can’t stand being able to do _nothing_.”

Sirius’ eyes snap up to fix on James, and he growls, “We've had the option to do something this whole bloody time, and I think it's time we took it!”

Peter has no idea what Sirius is on about, but James apparently does, because his face goes even stonier. “We're not doing it, so shut up,” he mutters.

"Give me one good reason why not," Sirius barks, giving up on the attempt to keep his voice down. Marianne and Vera turn round in their seats, looking concerned.

James shoots him a _shut up_ look before whispering, "Because we swore we wouldn’t. I know you don't give a damn about Remus' feelings, you’ve proven that well enough, but I'm not about to break my promise!'

The look Sirius gives James as he gets up from his chair makes Peter recoil, but James is unfazed. He rakes a hand through his hair, scoffs. “Throw one of your tantrums if it’ll make you feel better. You know I'm right."

Sirius' upper lip is twitching dangerously, his expression stormy, when the door opens again. In a moment of that synchronicity they have even when they’re fighting, James and Sirius both look up at the same time, as if they sniffed him out: Snape, walking into the classroom. Lily Evans comes in next and hurries to follow him. Hand shooting up to his hair again, James’ glare deepens. 

“Look alive, Black,” he mutters. “The wonder duo.”

Snape doesn’t acknowledge them as he heads with Lily toward the back of the classroom. As he passes them in the aisle, James sticks out a leg. Snape trips, falls, and spills his bag across the floor. A ripple of stifled laughter comes up from the seated students.

"Oops," says James.

Lily rushes to help Snape up, but Snape speaks before she does.

"Where's Lupin, Potter?" he murmurs. His lip curls. "I suppose he does get ill sometimes...Once in a blue moon..."

It happens so fast that it takes Peter a moment to make sense of it.

Sirius shoves past James to hurl himself bodily at Snape and, foregoing magic altogether, tackle him backwards. There’s a scuffle of bodies and robes and fists and a crash of furniture as they take down a desk and two chairs with them, and distinct through the gasps and cheers of onlookers and Professor Flitwick’s shocked protestations and James’ laughter Peter hears the sick, hollow _thwack_ of skull against stone as Sirius lands heavily across Snape’s knees, pushing him down with a hand to his throat—

“ _Sev!_ ” Lily cries, gone bone-white. She lunges forward, takes a fistful of Sirius’ robes, and, with more strength than Peter would’ve imagined could come out of her small frame, hauls him upright. Sirius flails in her grasp, still snarling at Snape on the floor: “Ought to rip your tongue out of your slimy head— say _one more thing_ about Remus, you sneaking scum, I _dare_ you—”

Lily’s voice is low and strange: “Sirius.”

He cuts off mid-threat to look down at her, and there’s a look on Lily’s face that’s so bizarre, so out of context that Peter has trouble placing it. It’s not…disappointment?

“Twenty points from Gryffindor!” Professor Flitwick cries shrilly, attempting to force the classroom into some order. "I never— such _appalling_ —!”

"I'm taking a walk," Sirius announces. The room quiets. James stops laughing. Sirius gives no second glance to Lily as she kneels down next to Snape, who’s rubbing the back of his head with a smug, satisfied expression, but stalks past the upended desk toward the front of the room.

Professor Flitwick is beside himself. “Detention, Mr Black! Seven o’clock tomorrow!”

Hand already on the doorknob, Sirius drawls, “Groovy.” The door slams shut behind him.

 

***

 

It keeps happening to Remus that he’ll wake up and, after a moment or two, remember.

He doesn’t think he _forgets_ , exactly, even while he’s asleep. Some part of him is always lingering on it. He has strange dreams, shallow in his subconscious, more thoughts than images. They’re strange enough that he wonders what the others would say if he had Sirius’ affliction of sleeptalking.

Following March’s full moon, the first full moon after (and that’s how time organizes itself for him now, _before_ and _after_ ), Remus dreams about how ancient thinkers— or was it Middle Ages? His timeline gets blurred. Pre-Renaissance, whoever it was— posited that the soul was a physical organ, and as such had mass and weight. Where is the organ of the soul? He dreams of the space under the heart, between the stomach and the liver. There’s something in there. He can feel it rattling around.

The soul in cubic centimetres. The weight of love in kilograms. His sleeping mind asks _Metric?_

“…spare when he hears we started on antidotes and he missed it.”

Maybe there’s a different system altogether. Metric, Imperial, Spiritual.

“Let’s be sure he lives first.”

Joules of energy. Pascals of pressure. Lupins of physical pain.

“Dunno. Might prefer death to failing his O.W.L.s.”

Remus blinks. He’s awake for a second— he’s in the hospital wing, his friends sitting around him— before he remembers. It’s familiar now, the sick lurch as he climbs back into his mind. Oh, that’s right.

It’s dark past the tall windows. James and Peter are talking quietly and haven’t noticed he’s awake yet, but Sirius’ eyes snap onto him immediately. He lurches to his feet, and the other two turn. James shouts, “MOONY!”, Peter runs off to fetch Madam Pomfrey, and Sirius stands there looking at him.

A tumble of noise falls out of James as he vaults over Peter’s vacated chair to drop onto the edge of Remus’ bed. He fusses with the pillow, the blankets. “Merlin’s left bollock, mate, you gave us a right scare, Pomfrey’s been pouring that blood restoring potion down your throat every half hour— great to see you up and at ’em, good on you, good on you, what d’you need, cold at all? Think it’s nippy in here—”

“Fine, Mum,” Remus teases, his voice embarrassingly hoarse. When he tries to clear his throat he finds that somebody’s rubbed it down with steel wool. He tries to sit up but he can’t quite feel his legs, or his anything. He looks at the dark windows, disoriented, and says, “Time is it?”

“Seven.”

“S’dark for seven.”

“Seven at night, plonker. You’ve been out all day.”

Remus swallows around his sore throat, then manages to croak, “Holy shit.”

“Can say that again. This one kicked your arse, pal.”

He raises his eyebrows before discovering that it hurts his head. “Nearly kicked it right into the grave, sounded like.”

James makes a face. “You heard that, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Guess you would’ve known anyway,” James replies. “Yeah. Wasn’t a good one.”

It’s by far Remus’ longest stint in the hospital wing yet, a full moon record: six days. While Madam Pomfrey insists that he needs rest, he spends most of his stay worrying himself sick over all the work he’s missing. With O.W.L.s a few short months away the teachers are buckling down like never before and the fifth years (save, naturally, James and Sirius) are struggling to keep up. The worst moon of his life may not have succeeded in killing him, but missing a week of classes just might.

He’s having help, thankfully. Professor McGonagall herself stops in on Friday to give him a review of their progress in Vanishment; the kindness of the gesture by itself cheers him up. He’s also visited constantly by his friends, Peter updating him on Arithmancy and James giving energetic and profanity-laced Charms lessons while they keep him company.

He isn’t surprised by the lack of Sirius. He was expecting it. Still, it’s…noticeable.

Finally Remus’ last day of confinement rolls around. There was some sort of scene in the Great Hall at lunch and James is in detention, so Peter’s visiting alone. He’s in the middle of explaining the trendy new spell that’s taking the castle by storm.

“Can’t hardly move for getting pulled up by the ankle. Most everybody’s started wearing trousers under their robes. Remember that when you get back.”

“Noted,” says Remus, scratching away at the number chart on his lap.

“James is hoping everybody will forget that he was the first person anybody used it on, you can tell. Lily at Slughorn’s party, remember? But Sirius, he—”

Remus has practised sliding past the name nonchalantly: hearing it and not jumping, saying it out loud without forgetting what he was talking about. Success has been mixed. “How is he?” he asks.

“Been better.” At Remus’ raised eyebrow Peter says, “He’s…temperamental, lately.”

“More than usual?”

“The first day you were out, he nearly gave Snape a concussion during Charms. Tackled him into a desk with Flitwick right in front of him.”

“Oh dear.”

“Yeah.” Peter wrings his hands in his lap. “Right before that James said that it was Sirius’ fault. That this moon was so bad, I mean.”

“Bet he loved that.”

“He didn’t argue.” When Remus says nothing, Peter goes on. “You and me…we talked about your. Your theory.”

“Yes.”

“Erm.”

“I suppose it makes sense. The worse a temper the wolf’s got on any given month, the more destructive he’s going to be.” Back to studying his Arithmancy chart, Remus notices that he’s been reading the same row of numbers over and over. “Sirius needn’t sulk. I’m alive. No harm done.”

“But what if it happens again?”

“It won’t,” Remus answers, aiming for breeziness. “I’ll get over myself, I’ll make sure both the wolf and I are in better spirits next month. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be. Nobody’s died, nobody’s been expelled. There’s no harm done.”

There’s a pause before Peter speaks in a low, cautious voice: “Y’know, you haven’t got to be embarrassed about being here.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“What happened last month— on your birthday no less— it’d…it’d upset anybody, wouldn’t it?”

Remus looks at him.

He picks up his Arithmancy chart. He picks a string of numbers at random, points, and says, “Explain this to me, would you?”

Peter looks like he wants to press the issue, but he doesn’t. He nods and pulls his chair closer.

 

***

 

Sirius looks down at the mirror in his lap. “James Potter,” he tells it.

A moment or two later, James’ face appears. “What,” he says.

“Where’d McGonagall put you?”

“Trophy room.”

The image in the mirror swivels, revealing the inside of one of the trophy cases. Carlos is perched atop a bronze statuette, dull yellow against the various colours of metal. “Oh,” Sirius says. “Thought she’d’ve come up with something more creative.”

“Reckon she’s out of ideas.” His view shifts as James sets the mirror down. At this angle Sirius can just see him check over his shoulder, drop his rag, and pick up his wand. Magically polishing the tarnished shield in front of him, James asks, “What do you want?”

“Moony’s getting out tonight, yeah?”

“You know he is.”

“Okay.”

James pointedly keeps his focus on the now spotless shield. Carlos hums in the background. “Was that all you wanted?”

“Yeah.”

“Fine,” says James. The mirror goes blank for a moment, and then Sirius is looking down at his own reflection.

“Fine!” Sirius says to no one. Tesla, who’s curled up at the foot of Sirius’ bed, raises her head and gives an irritable meow.

“I suppose you hate me too, now?” he asks. She stands up and, looking affronted, jumps off the bed and slinks away through the cracked dormitory door.

“Great,” Sirius mutters. “Even the cat can’t stand to look at me.”

He stalks down into the common room, bustling and noisy in the pre-dinner lull. As Sirius scans the room he looks for anyone, anything to distract him. Casey and Dirk are by the window playing Exploding Snap. He could join them, maybe. But no, that’s no good, because Sirius has always thought that the normal way of playing that game is boring, and it’ll only make him think about how it’s been so long since he played cards with his best friends— the score stagnated at one thousand and forty-eight to eight hundred and ninety-nine, that was months ago— and fuck, he really misses his best friends.

He sees them every day, sleeps in the same dormitory with them, sits with them during every meal and every lesson, but still he misses them desperately. How pathetic.

He’s about to turn around again and go back to sulking in the dormitory when his eyes fall on a familiar head of red hair sticking out of the top of a sofa. It gives him an odd feeling. Without a second thought he crosses the room, vaults himself over the back of the couch, and drops down onto the cushions next to her.

She startles, but quickly goes back to her book. She doesn’t say hello, or acknowledge him at all.

“James isn't around, you haven't got to act like you hate me.”

"No, suppose I haven't." She still isn't looking at him. "What do you want?"

“Er,” he begins. “Nothing, I suppose. I just...I don’t know if you've noticed, but my friends don’t speak to me."

"That's too bad.”

“I suppose I fancied some human interaction,” he says. It’s sort of a joke, but it’s really not.

“Right." She turns a page.

"So. How’s it going?”

"Fine,” she tells her textbook. Really, who’s this engaged by History of Magic? Then she asks, “How are you?" and Sirius takes a second to deal with it. It’s a hell of a question.

Well, Lily, he imagines saying. The world ended.

“Shitty.”

She keeps reading.

“Want to come upstairs? I’ve got a new Bowie— well, sort of new, couple of months— that we haven’t listened to yet.”

“No, thank you.”

“We—” He’s about to say _We always listen to new Bowie_ but he stops himself, knowing how childish and pathetic he’d sound. Whenever doesn’t he. "You're busy, then? I could come back."

"No, I don't think you should," she says. He wishes she’d look at him.

“Why?"

That changes something in her. She sits up, fixes him with her eyes, and says, "You've got a lot of nerve, you know.”

It isn't the first time he's heard that, but— “What?”

"I don't know what's wrong with me," she says, to herself now, "I ignored it before, I don't know _how_ , but it was like somehow I could separate it in my mind. The two of you by yourselves, it didn't matter how you were to each other, you were both still my friends so it didn't matter. God, what bollocks, thinking it didn't _matter_ —”

"Are you angry with me?"

She sighs. "Yes, Sirius, after five years I am finally angry with you.”

“What?"

She stares at him for a second, eyebrows raised, before letting out a slight breath of a laugh. “You really don’t know.”

“Are you going to tell me, or—”

“Remember the other day when you tackled my best friend into a desk?” she says. “Recall that at all?”

“ _That’s_ what this is about?” He can’t believe the turn in this conversation: she wants to talk about _Snape?_

“It’s not just that!” she says. “It’s— it’s _everything!_ I’ll never forgive myself for standing by for so long! I don't know what happened between you three and I don't want to— don’t deny it, I’ve heard things— but all of this has made me think. I can't..." She gives a frustrated exhale. “I can’t take people in isolation anymore, I can’t separate you from what you do, just because you don’t bully _me_ doesn’t mean I ought to be hanging round with you when you’re so cruel to my best friend!”

“There are things you don’t know! I can’t explain, but everything he gets he had coming, alright?”

“Don’t condescend to me. I know plenty.”

“Fine, you know things, whatever— but not about this.”

“Remus is a werewolf.”

All the breath falls out of Sirius as if he’d been punched. “How did—”

“Jeanette worked it out third year, she confided in me,” Lily says, matter-of-fact. She snaps her book shut. “She worked it out, tried to get Remus to confess multiple times, and when he still wouldn’t tell her the truth she ended it with him. She asked me for advice, I told her it was the right thing to do. She was rather conflicted about the whole thing.”

When Sirius stays dumbfounded for another handful of seconds, Lily laughs. There’s no humour in it. “You four— Potter’s invincible little gang, with all your secrets, thinking you’re so high and mighty that nobody will ever work any of it out. Remus dumped you, didn’t he?” she breathes, watching his expression with hard green eyes. “That’s why you’ve come to me. Couldn’t tell any of your _real_ friends. Don’t want to tarnish your friendship with Potter by confessing that a boy’s broken your heart, but me…well, doesn’t matter what you tell me. I don’t really count.”

“You do count!” Sirius protests around the angry knot forming in his throat. “We’re friends!”

“Are we?” Her eyes narrow. “Are we really? Because it seems like I’m nothing but a last resort when your proper friends are fed up with you.” She crosses her arms tightly over herself. “Potter isn’t an option, so I’m here to fix whatever problem you’ve got. Never mind what I might be going through— trying to explain to my friends what I’m doing sitting with Sev at lunch, trying to get him stop giving me grief about the boys I date, wondering if my sister will ever speak to me again— you’d never ask about any of that stuff, would you? Why would you care?”

"I _do_ care! I didn't know, is all! If you'd brought it up instead of throwing it at me now, we could've—” Sirius cuts off, shocked and spiraling; he tastes metal, loses track of what he’s saying. Desperate, he splutters, “I dunno why you’re holding up fucking Snivellus as the pinnacle of friendship all of a sudden!”

“Sneer at me and call me 'Evans' when Potter is around, just to save face!” she hisses. “That's not friendship, I deserve better than that! At least Sev never pretends not to care about me, and it’d be a lot easier for him if he did!” An odd, dark look goes over her face. She looks almost nervous. “His friends don't like that he hangs round me either.”

“You know why!” Sirius barks. “You know why they don’t like it!”

Her eyes narrow. “I think you’d better not talk about what you don’t understand.”

But he can’t help it; he ignores her icy look and says, too loudly, “They don’t like it because his friends are _Death Eaters!_ Did you hear what Mulciber tried on that second year, what’s-her-name—”

“It was awful what he did to Mary MacDonald, but that’s beside the point,” Lily interjects. “I’ve told Sev that I don’t like who he hangs out with, I don’t like them and they don’t like me, alright? But he never acts like he isn’t my friend because of them, he doesn't wait to talk to me until nobody's around to see!”

"Because nobody else likes him!” Sirius cries. He's aware that even over the noise of the common room they’re getting loud; a few heads have turned in their direction. "Of course he'd wanna be seen with you, it's the only thing keeping him from not being the most pathetic loser in the whole school!"

Lily looks at him. She nods to herself, a stiff set to her mouth. “Guess that's all I am, then. I expect he only speaks to me to social climb, right?”

"That's not what I'm saying, don’t put words in my mouth—”

“I don't care, Sirius, alright? I really don’t.” She opens her book again, and adds in a flat sort of voice: “Great, see, now you haven't got to pretend for Potter anymore."

Sirius feels lost. He just wanted a chat with somebody who didn't hate him, just wanted somebody to _look_ at him, but everything is crashing and burning before he fully understands exactly how he's fucked up this time, as everything is wont to do. He tries to think of something to say, but all his stricken brain can manage is, “I…I’m sorry.”

"Good for you," she says. "Now let me revise, will you?"

Sirius stands up, vaguely aware of half the common room watching. He'd hex them all, all the obnoxious gossips who can't leave well enough alone in this place, but he's washed over by a familiar numbness. He goes up to the dormitory and stays there.

He hadn't realised he had anybody left to lose.

 

***

 

March trudges slowly into April. The sky gets a tad bluer, Sirius continues his victory lap as sulking world champion, Remus keeps on acting like everything’s hunky-bloody-dory even though of _course_ it isn’t, and during the Gryffindor versus Ravenclaw match James nearly gets decapitated by a Bludger because he’s distracted thinking about Lily Evans. He’s about ninety-five percent sure he saw his ex-girlfriend laugh at him when that happened, while she hovered some metres away on the lookout for the Snitch. Unfair of James to blame Florence, though, since just about the entire population of the stands laughed at the barrel-roll he did to avoid getting his brains knocked out.

All in all, this new… _development_ with Lily would be the worst even if he weren’t also in the midst of the longest stretch of cold-shouldering with his best friend he’s ever experienced. He would very much like somebody to talk to about the nerve of Lily Evans, walking around with her stupid _hair_ and her stupid _eyes_ and her stupid _smile_ which does things to her stupid eyes like makes them _scrunch up at the corners_ and Merlin’s hairnet, she’s unbearable. Sirius would tease him mercilessly, of course. Used to when they were kids the other three were at James constantly with jokes about him fancying her which, in fairness, he did, but they didn’t know anything about that so it was hardly their business to make fun of him, was it?

But now the damn thing’s back! James thought he kicked his big stupid crush on Lily Pain-the-Arse Evans when he was fourteen but now it’s back and more forceful than ever, in a bizarrely grown-up sort of way, the sort of way that really does just want to _talk_ to her.More than half of the time when James checks out in lessons in favour of staring at her he’s just wondering stupid inane things like what her favourite food is or what her favourite colour is, good Godric, how does he not know what her favourite colour is?

James’ life is a mess. Remus’ last moon was so bad that it nearly killed him and they’ve got no reason to suspect that the next one will be any better, Severus fucking Snape won’t keep his mouth shut, Sirius’ betrayal keeps growing from a single act of idiocy to an ever-expanding shit snowball that rolled its way out of hell and into their lives. And yet here he is, in the path of the shit snowball, just wanting to know everything there is to know about Lily Evans.

James may be stupider than even he gave himself credit for.

It’s after midnight on a Tuesday in April when James gives up on trying to fall asleep. He’s been having trouble with that recently, and Sirius prattling on in his sleep doesn’t help. Careful not to wake up Carlos, who’s snoring softly on the pillow, James climbs out of bed.

“Lizards,” says Sirius, quite clearly.

“Right you are, mate,” James mutters. He heads down to the common room. Maybe he’ll have a late night stroll.

No such luck. Sitting in an armchair by the dying fire, glowing faintly in the light of the embers, is none other than Lily Evans. She’s reading _Witch Weekly_ by wandlight in a pale yellow dressing gown that’s just well-worn enough to cling gently to all the graceful dips and swells of her. On an unrelated note, James wants to die.

“Evans,” he blurts. No, doesn’t blurt. Says in a smooth and masculine voice. “What’re you doing here?”

She raises her eyes from the magazine. Her features are soft and elegant and entirely unimpressed in the firelight. “I could ask you the same thing.”

He musses his hair nervously. Actually, no, it was in a cool and debonair manner. “I asked you first.”

“I’m waiting on Remus, his patrol shift’s almost done and I’m taking over,” she says. Then she goes back to her reading and her usual practise of pretending that James is a piece of furniture.

Emboldened by the fact that there’s nobody around to witness him saying something stupid, James gives it a try. “So. How was Careers Advise?”

“Fine.” She turns a page. “Yours?”

“Fine,” James says.

When she doesn’t make any response, he opens his mouth and more words fall out. “Yeah, still don’t know exactly what I’m going to do. Dad still has a bunch of business connections— he started a line of apothecaries, ages ago, he’s retired now— and reckons I could do that, but Mum thinks I ought to follow in her footsteps and do stuff at the Ministry. She was head of International Magical Cooperation back in the day, yhat’s how she got over here in the first place, she was in foreign affairs with the ministry in India and then they sent her over here during the partition to do diplomatic stuff, then she got a job here and met Dad and, well, there you go. And of course I’m gonna play Quidditch for England, but there’s not much, y’know, longevity there, you can’t be an athlete forever and then where are you, you know? And it’s stupid but I actually got to thinking about how when I was a little kid— dunno where I heard it, just liked the idea— well, I wanted to be an Auror.”

To James’ joy and surprise, that gets her attention. Her eyes flick up from the page, narrowing curiously. “ _You_ wanted to be an Auror?”

“Yeah, well,” he says, feeling his face heating up for some godforsaken reason. He leans back against the doorframe to the stairwell and drags a hand through his hair. “You know, the ideas you get in your head when you’re a kid. Wasn’t there something you wanted to do when you were a little kid?”

She bounces her crossed leg thoughtfully. Her foot hangs there, toenails varnished pink, bare and exposed and innocently intimate like the sort of thing only seen by people close to her, a little sliver of vulnerability that makes James feel guilty, actually _guilty_ , and there was once a time when James considered himself to be good with the ladies but if seeing a girl’s _foot_ makes him feel like a voyeur he’s got a long way to go.

“When I was a little girl I wanted to be a hairdresser,” Lily says.

“Yeah?” He runs a hand through his hair. “Still gonna do that?”

“No, I won’t have the time.” She looks at him with her eyebrows raised a bit and says, casual as anything, “I’m going to be Minister of Magic.”

A wide grin spreads across James’ face without him telling it to. “I don’t doubt that a bit,” he tells her, and he means it.

Lily doesn’t say anything, just looks at him with an expression like faint surprise. Eventually, the ghost of a smile lights around the corners of her mouth. James has a sensation that’s like scoring a Quidditch goal and like drinking a gulp of hot butterbeer and like lying by the lake in the sun. Like being smiled at by Lily Evans.

At the other side of the common room the portrait hole swings open, and Lily turns around. Remus climbs in and smiles at them, seemingly oblivious of the fact that he just ruined the first real conversation James has ever had with Lily and that he and James are, on an unrelated note, no longer friends.

“Evening.” He walks up to James. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Er, no,” James says. Witty, handsome, popular Quidditch heroes don’t get insomnia. He musses his hair. “I just left my, erm,” he darts a look around, “book.”

“Which?”

“Er.” He grabs a thin volume from the nearest end table without looking at it. “This one.”

Remus plucks the book from James’ hand and looks at the cover, eyebrows climbing higher. “ _Prefects Who Gained Power_?” he reads. “Intriguing. I thought you’d decided that the noble path of prefectry wasn’t for you?”

Yep, they are definitely no longer friends. James snatches the book back from Remus, who’s faced away from Lily and smirks at him, the bastard, before James can escape into the stairwell again.

James lies down in bed, no more sleepy than he was before, but now in possession of a copy of _Prefects Who Gained Power_. Great. Far out.

The other two are still fast asleep. “Lizards,” says Sirius.

“Tell me about it, mate,” James mumbles.

 

***

 

“Sorry about him,” Remus says, gesturing in the direction of the stairs.

Lily stands and puts her magazine aside. “You weren’t even in the room.”

“Yes, but I’m sorry regardless.”

She laughs quietly. “We just talked about Careers Advise.”

“Oh? How’d yours go?”

“Alright, I think. I’m still not sure which step I’ll be taking immediately after school, so Professor McGonagall and I decided that I’d just try for as many O.W.L.s as possible and leave my options open.” She shrugs. “Still working out my plan. What about you, what’ll you be doing?” Remus watches with some amusement the exact moment that Lily realises what she’s said, the predicament she’s put him in. She frantically backpedals, her face on its way to matching her hair. “I mean, you haven’t got to tell me, of course, it’s all very, er, complex, so if you don’t want to discuss—”

Remus holds up a hand, smiling. “It’s fine.” He sighs and then, as gently as he can manage, says, “My Careers Advise session was incredibly short. For reasons I’m sure you’ve already…ascertained?” It comes out with a question mark at the end, prompting.

Even after she’s been given permission to say it, Lily still grimaces apologetically. “Because you’re a werewolf?”

He nods, businesslike. “That did come up, yes.”

“Jeanette worked it out, not me.”

“What? When?”

“Early on in third year. She only broke up with you because you wouldn’t tell her the truth.”

“My God. I always knew that girl was too smart for me.”

There’s a pause while Lily gets a peculiar look on her face. It’s a hesitant set of the mouth, a glint in the eye, that the Gryffindor in Remus recognises: testing her own nerve. Finally, she says, “You do seem to go for the clever ones, don’t you?”

Remus laughs out loud. He appreciates Lily, he really does. “He did mention that you knew about that.”

“So…how is that going?”

He strolls over to the fire. “It isn’t, funnily enough,” he answers.

“Ah,” comes Lily’s voice. The fire crackles quietly. “I did wonder.”

He turns his focus to the embers, keeps his voice light. “Did you now?”

“Yes, well,” she mumbles. He can practically hear her twirling hair around her finger, pretending to be casually indifferent to this development. “And the way you lot have been lately…I know something happened at the Willow, everybody heard about that, but I got the feeling with the way Sirius has been acting that there was something else as well. I wondered if that was it.”

Remus could almost laugh again. Lily’s goodhearted nosiness is comforting in its familiarity. Well, he might as well tell her. Who else can he confide in? “Yes. I ended it.”

“That, er...surprises me, that it was you."

“I know,” he jokes, peering at her over his shoulder. “I’m hardly enough of a catch to turn down the most sought-after boy in Hogwarts, am I?”

She goes red again. “No— no, you’re—I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. It’s just that you’ve…” Her hands flutter nervously around her face in an _I’m not saying this right_ sort of gesture. “I know we aren’t close, so it’s presumptuous of me to even mention it—”

“Only a bit,” Remus says kindly.

“You’ve just seemed so sad,” she blurts. “For somebody who ended it himself, I mean. I’ve wanted to say something for a while and I never have, because I know there are so many things that you can’t tell people, what with being…” She trails off, nerve failing her.

“I can’t tell if you’re alluding to the lycanthropy or the bisexuality, but neither of them are easy, no,” Remus admits. He shrugs. “The latter isn’t so awful. I’ve expressed interest in girls before so I’m, er, innocent until proven guilty in that respect, I guess. Sirius has got it harder; people are going to start suspecting things one of these days.”

Lily looks at him with great sympathy on her pretty face, curls her fingers up into the sleeves of her yellow dressing gown, and gets to the question she’s been dancing around since he walked in: “What happened?”

Sinking into the nearest chair, Remus sighs. How to explain? Lily knows all the necessary secrets at this point to be told the entire truth, more so than even Peter and James do, but Remus hasn’t forgotten that Lily is somehow, inexplicably, friends with both Sirius and Snape. Or at least she was before. He can’t be sure about the state of anything to do with Sirius these past weeks.

“Sirius…” He chooses his words carefully. “Sirius played a prank, a prank that involved me, and it went too far. After that happened I knew it was best that I ended things between us.”

“A prank?”

“Of sorts.”

“Oh,” Lily says. She wanders over to Remus’ chair by the fire and sits down next to it, cross-legged on the carpet, watching the low-burning coals. They sit there in silence for a few moments, and just when Remus thinks she isn’t going to say anything else, she softly says, “It must’ve been awful.”

The simple remark, the quiet sympathy of it, hits him squarely in the chest in a way that makes him want to hide; he brings his knees up and wraps his arms tightly around them. It isn’t news, what she said. But maybe he needed to hear somebody else say it. Curled up into himself in a chair in the dark common room, with somebody listening, Remus finally allows himself to accept that it was awful.

“He could’ve been expelled for it,” Remus says. His voice blends into the low, warm crackling from the grate. “Probably should’ve been, I still don’t know how he got out of it. But even with how terrible the whole of it was, I keep fixating on small parts of it. Inconsequential things.”

He takes a long breath. “He waited until right after, when he knew I was ending things, to tell me that he loved me. He said it right then, and I had to stand there and say nothing. Having to say _nothing_ , it felt like…” He shakes his head. “He must’ve known that would hurt. Maybe it was revenge, I don’t know. Somehow that ended up being the worst of what he did, or it felt that way, and I don’t like what that says about me. It’s horribly selfish, after what he did, thinking _that_ was the worst of it.”

He isn’t looking at Lily but he feels her eyes on him. “We don’t get to choose what hurts us. You haven’t got to blame yourself for it.” She sighs. “You’re going to anyway. But somebody ought to tell you that you haven’t got to.”

When Remus goes up to the dormitory he feels better, having said it out loud. He feels _different,_ anyway, and that’s something.

Remus is used to having secrets. Putting on a face to pretend to James and Peter and anybody else who’s watching that he’s doing alright is nothing new; his life is centred around pretending, keeping quiet, not arousing suspicion. Shutting up keeps him safe. It’s a novel feeling, then, when he spills all of his secrets to an acquaintance whom he has no real reason to trust and finds that the sky hasn’t fallen. He’s grateful to Lily for that.

He dresses for bed as quietly as he can so as not to wake the others, nearly tripping over Tesla in the dark. Past the window the moon is barely half-illuminated, a broken wedge of white suspended over the mountains, outshined by a patchwork of stars. The full’s still a week away but already Remus feels weakness in his muscles, creakiness in his joints as if he were forty years older, a vigilance in the back of his mind that won’t let him sleep— the moon’s greedy already, pulling on him sooner than it ever has. It doesn’t help the despair that’s always so close to the surface lately.

 _Please_ , he begs nobody in particular. He leans against his bedside cabinet to stare out the window. _Not another one…I can’t do another one, not like last time…_

But he knows it’s useless. The wolf does what he wants, and what he wants is to tear into his host two months in a row. Remus can tell. He can always tell.

“Moony.”

He jumps half out of his skin. “Jesus, you—”

Remus turns to follow Sirius’ voice and has a split second of confusion. It was definitely him, clear as day from his bed right beside Remus’, but when his eyes find him he’s fast asleep behind the parted bed hangings, lying on his side with an arm hanging over the edge. It’s a disorienting second before Remus remembers.

“Moony,” Sirius repeats, and if his eyes were open he could be awake. “Moony.” He shifts in his sleep, turns over, mumbles something else, and falls into silence again.

Remus crawls into bed and gives up any hope of identifying where the moon pains stop and the heartache starts. Everything hurts, and he has a choice in none of it. He watches the moon through the window until the sky begins to lighten.

 

***

 

James tries to not let tough times get to him. He’s proud to be one of those obnoxious people who maintain that there’s an upside to everything— silver linings, and all that. That being said, the morning after April’s full moon is so utterly shitty that James wants nothing more than to go upstairs, get back into bed, and say a hearty ’fuck you’ to this whole nightmare of a term.

They went to the hospital wing at the crack of dawn, so even by the time the three of them wander miserably into the Great Hall for breakfast only a smattering of people are seated at the long tables. They sit there in silence, nobody eating much, poking at their food and ignoring each others’ gazes under the irritatingly sunny sky. Sirius, predictably, is the first one to crack.

He throws down his fork with a _clang_. “I hate this.”

James is having none of it. “Join the club, sunshine,” he snaps, impaling a sausage with his fork.

“And yet you’re the one who won’t let us do anything about it,” Sirius growls.

James could fucking throttle him. It’s only for poor Peter’s sake, sitting there on his other side going blotchy pink with nerves, that he doesn’t lean across the table, take a handful of Sirius’ stupid poncy hair, and shove him face-first into his scrambled eggs. Instead James grits his teeth and says, “We’re not doing it.”

“Why not?”

“ _You know bloody well why!_ We’ve only gone over this ten thousand—”

“Er, sorry,” squeaks Peter. “Do what?”

“Never you mind,” says James, still glaring at Sirius. “We promised we wouldn’t, and after all the shit he’s gone through— after _another_ moon that nearly fucking killed him— we owe it to him to listen to what he wants!”

“It isn’t about what he wants, it’s about what’ll save his life!”

James can’t help it: he snorts. Isn’t that just rich. “You sure weren’t thinking that way when you told our worst enemy and _actual Death Eater_ what he is! This is all your fault!”

It stings, James can see it does. Something twitches over Sirius’ face before he bites it back, gnawing stubbornly on his bottom lip. Then he says, “Why do you think I'm trying so hard to fix it, huh?"

James raises his eyebrows. That's about the closest thing to a real admission of guilt he’s heard make its way out of Sirius’ mouth all these weeks.

“The moons are gonna get better, they’ve got to,” James insists. “And even if they don’t for a while…” He hates having to say this. But he promised Remus. “He hasn’t died yet, has he? He’s a tough bloke, he’ll be okay.”

“You can’t know that!”

“Listen, you bloody-minded—!”

“Er, P-Prongs?” stammers Peter, eyes darting nervously at the group of fellow fifth years sitting down right across from them. James gets the message and shuts up, then shoots Sirius a warning glance. Sirius makes a sound like _hrrmf_ before settling into his now-traditional sulky silence.

It’s going to be a long week.

 

***

 

“Padfoot and Prongs are up to something,” Peter tells Remus on the fifth day of his hospital wing incarceration. He’s sitting by his bed and trying to help Remus review Potions notes, but it’s got a distinct blind-leading-the-blind feel to it.

Remus quirks an eyebrow. “Whenever are they not. Hang on, what’s the griffin claw do in Strengthening Solutions?”

“Damned if I know. And yeah, but I think this might be…I dunno. Bad. Sirius keeps wanting to do it, whatever it is, but James won’t let him. Must be trouble if even James isn’t up for it, right?”

With a distracted shrug Remus flips frantically to the index of _One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi_. “Probably, but personally I’m more concerned with not failing my exams. Of course _now_ these are the moons that keep me out for whole bloody weeks— I’m going to get T on everything, as if I weren’t already unemployable enough…”

“You’re smart, you’ll do fine.”

“I’m not Sirius and James smart,” Remus points out. “I’m just saying, if the wolf’s trying to kill me, I’d rather he do it quickly. This drawn-out affair is all quite messy.”

Remus smiless wryly. But even after days of bedrest his colour is still off, and Peter has trouble laughing at the joke.

 

***

 

Remus tells them before breakfast that Madam Pomfrey is finally, _finally_ letting him out today after lessons. As soon as Divination’s over James and Sirius book it all the way down from North Tower to the first floor to collect him, only to end up standing there waiting for Peter to show up; they forgot that Professor Vector has an annoying habit of keeping everybody late. It’s during this lull that James finds himself, as he so often has these past two months, trying his damnedest to keep Sirius from completely fucking losing it.

“He should be out by now,” Sirius growls, pacing up and down the corridor in front of the door. “What if something’s wrong?”

“Would you quit it?” James says. “You’re gonna give me a stress ulcer. He’ll be here in a bit, now chill out.”

Sirius just grumbles wordlessly before throwing himself at the hospital wing doors. For a second James things he’s going to try to ram them down— wouldn’t put it past him, with the level of mania at which he’s been operating— but then he puts his ear against the wood. James rolls his eyes.

“Dunno what you think you’re gonna hear, he’ll only be—”

“Shut up!” Sirius hisses. “It’s McGonagall!”

“ _What?_ ”

“C’mere!”

James bolts over and presses up against the double doors. After a few moments of silently scuffling over prime eavesdropping space at the door crack, he and Sirius fall still and listen. Sure enough, it’s Professor McGonagall’s voice that James hears just on the other side of the threshold, low and urgent, as if not to reach Remus at the far end of the hospital wing:

"...of predicting when it happens?"

James has to strain his ears to hear Madam Pomfrey’s response: “We’ve never known for sure why he’s more violent some months than others, but I don’t see how it can be a coincidence. Sixteen-year-olds have their ups and downs, of course, but —”

“You believe there’s a connection?”

“I think we can safely assume,” Madam Pomfrey murmurs. “I don’t imagine that stunt of Black's months ago has made his life any easier."

"I daresay it wouldn’t,” Professor McGonagall mutters darkly. “The headmaster is confident that the Snape boy won’t tell a soul, but I confess I’m not so certain…”

“I think it’s time I spoke to Albus myself. Something must be done.”

“But what?”

“I’ve no idea, I can only hope he’ll think of something. Because the fact of the matter is…” Madam Pomfrey says, dropping her voice even quieter. James smushes his ear closer against the wood and just makes out, “It’s a question of the boy’s life.”

James’ stomach drops out. At his side, he hears Sirius stop breathing.

Professor McGonagall makes a short, shocked sound, quickly cut off before she lowers her voice again. “You’re sure?”

“There’s a reason werewolves have shortened life expectancies,” comes Madam Pomfrey’s whisper. “And the ones bitten young get the worst prognosis— transforming’s tough enough on bodies that have finished growing. In children and adolescents…” There’s a pause. “I’m sorry to say it, but it’s lethal more often than it’s not.”

“Gracious…I’d no idea.”

“You can imagine I’ve never felt the need to mention it to the boy,” she says, grim, “but it’s astounding he survived his transformations before coming to school, as young as he was and without real treatment. I’ve had good luck with him for years, but I worry now. This degree of damage twice in so short a time…” She cuts off. “We’ll just hope there isn’t a third. He won’t live through it.”

Professor McGonagall must say something to that, but James doesn't hear it, because Sirius shoves himself off from the door and sprints in the opposite direction, and oh for _fuck’s_ sake. James goes flying after him.

"OY! Get back here! _Accio!_ "

A mistake: he forgot that Sirius is taller than him (for now, it's not James' fault the inbred freak had his growth spurts so early) and nearly knocks him to the ground when he comes crashing backwards into him. James seizes him around the middle and yelps, “NO! We promised! It was a stupid idea in the first place to keep it, it was stupid--"

"It was your idea!”

“Yeah, and it was stupid!" James cries. "Is that suddenly out of the ordinary?"

"I've had enough of this," Sirius snarls, and he's got that glint in his eye and that curl to his lip that means he's beyond any kind of rational thought. “I can’t take it, it’s too much, I can’t just let him—”

He doesn't finish the sentence, just elbows James in the stomach, frees himself, and bolts. Before James can follow, though, Sirius pulls out his wand, points it over his shoulder, and cries, " _Petrificus totalus!_ "

Going rigid and smacking your head on the stone floor really fucking hurts, James discovers. He can’t do anything about it, though, besides try to communicate _THAT WAS LOW AND UNGRYFFINDOR_ with the force of his glare alone as Sirius comes into view above him.

He peers down at James’ immobilised form, says, “See you at the Shack,” and takes off at a run.

 

***

 

"How am I looking?"

"Er," says Peter.

Remus laughs. "That bad? Can't imagine why, I feel perfectly fine."

"You're limping," Peter points out.

He rolls his eyes. "No I'm not." He is.

"Y'know," Peter begins tentatively. He's tried to suggest this a dozen times over the past month but he keeps chickening out. The situation, though, has become pretty dire. "Maybe you ought to...talk about this?”

"About what?" says Remus breezily.

"You know what I mean."

“Rough moons happen. I don't know what there is to talk about."

Peter groans internally. Even for Remus, the grand master of denial, this is getting silly. “You can't act like this is normal.”

"Wonder what's keeping the other two," says Remus. They approach the bend in the corridor. "You said they were meeting us?"

"Er....yeah.” Peter sighs. He supposes he's chickening out again. He doesn’t have time to linger on it long, though, before they turn the corner and let out shocked gasps: James lies rigid and frozen on the floor just ahead. They run forward.

“What now,” Remus breathes. " _Finite incantatum_."

The second the jinx is reversed James leaps to his feet, wild-eyed. He barely glances at the other two before he whirls around, stumbles a few paces back the way they came, and shouts, “We gotta go, come on!"

“What?”

“Who jinxed you?"

But James doesn't answer, just seizes the two of them by their wrists and tries to drag them along; he’s facing backwards, trips over his own feet in his frenzy. "No time! I'll explain on the way, c'mon—”

"You'll explain now.” Remus’ voice has gone flinty, and Peter can’t much blame him.

James pants, breath coming fast as his eyes dart frantically between them. “Sirius did something— no, we did something, now he's about to do something and we’ve got to stop it.”

Peter feels a hard spike of fear block his throat. The sentence 'Sirius did something' has quite a lot of weight these days.

Remus goes very still. “What?”

 

***

 

Sirius does some quick thinking.

How soon will Remus and Peter find James? Soon, no doubt. He’s got maybe five minutes of head start on them, ten if he’s the luckiest bastard in the school and probably world, which doesn’t seem likely.

He races through the corridors, dodging a group of seventh years and not even bothering with the gang of tiny Ravenclaws, electing instead to bowl straight through them. Remus is the prefect, not him. Remus, whose actual life is in danger because his whole existence has gotten fucked up by Sirius’ temper— the Willow, Sirius has got to get to the Willow. He pushes himself, runs harder, slides down a bannister, runs headlong through a ghost and sputters at the cold but keeps going, he's got to get to the Willow, he thinks about Remus— for something new and different, bloody fucking hell, when is he _not_ — and he’ll get to the Willow if it’s the last damned thing he ever does.

 _They'll just catch you and pull you back_ , says a voice in his mind. _You learned that with James and Snivellus, there isn't enough room in there for you to avoid anybody. You haven't got enough of a head start for that._

Alright, fine, yes, but he hasn't got any other option, he thinks desperately as he skirts around Mrs Norris, who eyes him suspiciously. He's just going to have to take the Willow passage and hope for the best because it's the only shot he's got, it's not as if—

Sirius could punch himself in the face. _It's not as if there's another passageway out of here that James and Peter don't know about,_ oh wow, great thinking Black, real fucking intelligent.

He turns on his heel and runs in the direction of the library, heading for the mirror and its secret chamber and the tunnel beyond. He and Remus never did get around to following the mirror passageway to see where it ends, true, but he'll have an enormous advantage no matter what: the tunnel's loads bigger and easier to move in, he can run full out instead of crouching and crawling at a snail's pace like you've got to in the Willow passage, Merlin's fucking pants, why didn't he think of it before, he truly is too stupid to live, this will save his plan— no, fuck him and fuck his plan, this will save Remus’ life, this is his shot—

Except it isn't. The problem hits Sirius with such force that he nearly upends a dozen suits of armour, domino-style, when he careens to a sudden halt. He can see the mirror from here but the passageway is useless, obviously it is: Remus knows about it. Obviously, _obviously_ , they ought to make Sirius start over at first year again, obviously it's the same problem as the Willow passage, it’s no good. Remus will tell the others about it, they'll chase him down and drag him back or hex him or stop him somehow and then they'll get to the potion first and get rid of it and there's his plan ruined, and there's Remus fucking _dead_ , no, no, the stakes are too high for him to be that stupid—

He’ll go to the Willow, then. Reverse psychology! He turns around again. Yes, the perfect bluff, they'll be expecting him in the mirror passageway, he'll really catch them unawares by not going for it!

Unless they're expecting that, too. Sirius wants to set something on fire.

He stops in the middle of the corridor to throw a short, silent fit, ignoring the strange looks from a couple of fourth year girls strolling past. This is too much, it's too much, he can’t fuck this up, for a second he imagines Remus actually _dead_ , torn up by his own teeth and claws and gone forever and no no _no_ , everything in him wails _no_ so loudly that he can’t think anything else— but he needs to think, he needs to fucking _think_ …

 

***

 

"The potion, you remember the potion," James says. For the first time Peter notices that his face has turned a funny colour: deep brown gone grey.

"Which?"

"The one that you drink before you turn into an animal, the one that’s got to be green and not turquoise,” James rambles, “and that you'd better hope you’ve bewitched correctly and done all the incantations right or else it’ll turn you into mush, the one we tried to make but you said— probably accurately— that it was wrong and that if we drank it we'd die, _that_ potion, remember?"

Remus stands perfectly still. “I recall.”

"We did something bad," James says, his face falling in what has got to be shame and oh that's bloody _weird_ , “it was my idea, it was all my fault, I shouldn't have suggested it and now—”

"What?”

"I suggested to Sirius that we don't throw out the old potion but keep it just in case!"

“In case of _what_ , Prongs?”

"I don't know!" he moans. Shame slumps his shoulders. "It made sense at the time!" He’s quite beside himself and Peter really hopes Remus takes charge of the situation because somebody’s bound to come down this corridor any second—  

“What you're telling me is that Sirius is currently on his way to go drink this potion that you two kept, is that right?"

"Yeah!" James wails miserably.

Remus, though, is businesslike. “Where is it?”

"The Shack, we hid it there! We've got to get to the Willow, he—”

"No, we..." Remus pauses. There's a new look on his face, an oddly closed one. “There’s the Willow but…or we could go through the…”

"What?"

His eyes fall. Peter has the impression that he's thinking hard.

“ _Moony!_ ” James shouts, growing more hysterical by the second. “We’ve got to go _now!_ ”

Remus shakes himself. "Yes, Willow, right!” he says, and leads the way.

 

***

 

Sirius swears with enough venom to make the occupant of a nearby portrait squeak, “Now, _really!_ ”

The others will take either the Willow or the mirror passage and he’s got no way of knowing which. If he picks the same one they do it's over, it's done, they’ll do away with the potion and that’ll be the end, and while Sirius stands here going out of his mind about it they're coming after him and he's losing his head start with every second that ticks by. He's got to make up his mind. Fast.

Sirius paces, thinking, thinking, willing his stupid brain to work faster. Merlin, if only there was some way out of here that nobody else knew about, if there was just one more passageway! But even if there is one somewhere he doesn't know it, and it's not as though he could track down an _entirely new_ bloody secret tunnel right now just by sheer stupid luck--

He takes a memory like a slap to the face.

Last winter hols, when he and Regulus were locked outside and Kreacher let them in. And Reg… Reg rambled some sort of nonsense…

 _“Password,” Regulus mumbles. “_ Dissendium _, that’s what it is. Potter hit the right statue but he didn’t say_ Dissendium _, you’ve got to say_ Dissendium _.”_

"Holy fuck," Sirius says aloud. He turns and, sprinting like there's a herd of angry hippogriffs on his tail, heads for the third floor.

 

***


	3. malpractice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What am I to take away from that?” 
> 
> “Nothing. It was a moment of weakness and I wish you’d forget it happened.”

 

***

 

"Moony, now is not the time for a leisurely stroll! Run, already!"

Behind them, Remus screws up his face but moves no faster. "Right you are."

James is about to shout at him again (he's in full-blown panic mode and shouting about anything seems like a good plan) when Peter cuts him off: “It’s because he’s _limping_ , look."

"I am not l—”

"Holy shit, he's limping," says James. He could kick himself, how’d he not see that?

"Don't be ridiculous," Remus says with a snort, continuing to hurry along after them and pretend that he isn’t teetering and shuffling like somebody who can’t bend their knees properly.

"Oh, _we're_ ridiculous?" James stops running and points in a random direction. “Oy, get a load of that elephant in the room!”

“What?”

He rounds on Remus, the urgency of the situation forgotten as a wave of frustration crashes over him. “Can we just, for variety's sake, stop acting like you aren't dying inside which is causing you to almost die _outside_ , it'd be such a refreshing change to not have to dance round the subject!”

“I don't kn—”

“Shut your mouth or I'll hex it off!”

Remus looks unfazed. “The wolf's been losing his temper lately, I don't see why we've got to be so dramatic just because he's--"

"Calling it 'he' won't change the fact that it's _you_ , Remus!” James explodes. “‘The wolf’, ‘the wolf’— it’s _you_ , alright? Now get your head out your arse!"

He's gone too far. All expression wipes itself from Remus’ face. James sees his throat work, but the pause stretches on.

_Well_ , James thinks. _No taking it back now_.

“Obviously you're upset,” he goes on. He ignores that horrible, horrible non-expression Remus stares at him with. “Anyone would be. Your friend betrayed you and now the biggest git in the known universe knows what you are and is being blackmailed into not blabbing about it to his Death Eater cronies— which might work or might not,” he rambles, “and then your secret’d be out to the whole world and you’d get expelled and shunned and what-the-bloody-hell-ever— it's pretty upsetting! But you acting like you're just fucking swell all the time, when _nobody_ buys it, when Madam Pomfrey's talking to McGonagall about how another moon like this will kill you--"

"She said that?"

_Oh fuck,_ James thinks. “Yeah, we heard her, that's what set Sirius off! He reckoned your life was in danger so he nearly gave me a concussion and went off to turn himself into a pile of goo, so, yeah,” he finishes, voice climbing up an octave in sheer hysteria, “that’s where we are!”

"Maybe we ought to be going," Peter says. His face is the colour of day-old porridge.

“You're right, you're right,” James says, then he remembers the problem that’d slowed them in the first place: “But what about—”

Halfway through the thought James has the solution. He marches up to Remus and, before he can say another damn word, scoops him up, throws him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and takes off.

Remus is less than pleased with the development. Thrashing around enough to topple over a person who isn't used to staying on a broomstick while being pelted with Bludgers, Remus shouts, " _What the hell is wrong with you?!_ "

“No time to open that can of worms," James pants as he and Peter race for the stairs. "Time's of the essence!"

 

***

"Fucking Regulus," Sirius mutters as he bolts past the trophy room and ignores a passing taunt from Peeves. "Never thought he'd be _useful_..."

Ignoring the unpleasant thought that he’s now indebted to his idiot little brother, Sirius keeps running and there it is up ahead: the statue of the humpbacked witch, the one that exploded hot pink dye all over James and the one they hid from Filch behind the night they chased each other up to the Astronomy Tower last year, the one that's been there all this time, just sitting here on the third floor and Sirius never looked at it twice, never had any reason to imagine that it was secretly hiding a passageway that for some reason somebody in that lot of snakes knew about but they didn’t. That thought’s even more unpleasant than the first, and when he skids to a stop in front of the statue he vents his feelings by giving the old crone's wizened face a good whack with his wand.

“ _Dissendium_.”

Part of him -- a large part of him-- is positive it won't work, that he's lost all of his head start for this stupid, stupid idea his stupid little brother planted in his head. But no, now the statue’s hunched back is _opening_ — it widens into a narrow entrance, just wide enough for him to force his shoulders through, and he only gets stuck for a few seconds before he slides headfirst onto a smooth stone chute, like the one at the top of the mirror passageway. He hits the cold earth floor, lights his wand, and raises it. The tunnel stretches out ahead into darkness and, presumably, Hogsmeade.

"Wicked," Sirius breathes.

 

***

There's probably something indicative of their collective reputation in that the three of them make it all the way out onto the grounds with Remus thrown over James' shoulder, punching and kicking and protesting at the top of his voice, without a single person looking at them twice. James wishes he could at least be surprised about this, but he really isn't.

He finally puts Remus down once they're halfway across the gently rippling lawn, the Willow looming ahead against the clear blue sky, but it’s the _clear blue sky_ detail that sets off some alarms in James’ head. He turns around: yeah, the grounds are full of people hanging around, lazing by the lake, enjoying the beautiful April weather.

"Oh shit," says Peter.

"Yeah," James says. "Yeah, that's gonna be an issue."

Remus says, “Alright, well—”

James cuts him off: “Diversion!” He raises his wand, points it at one of the beech trees by the lake that's a ways away from anybody, and sets it on fire.

Over the confused shouts of terror in the distance, Remus cries, “The Cloak, you idiot!"

"Oh," says James, remembering the ancient and infallible family heirloom Invisibility Cloak that he very much has with him right now. He waves a hand. “Whatever, let's go!”

 

***

 

Sirius runs through the dark and twisting tunnel and keeps running. The pool of light from his wand bounces frantically, slashing shadows across the uneven earth walls, and the passage twists and turns and Sirius stumbles on the uneven ground and this one has got to be every bit as long as the Willow passage but at least here he can run unimpeded, not having to crouch and crawl all the way. He wonders where he'll emerge. That train of thought quickly becomes useless— the passage floor is rising. Whatever’s on the other end, he’s meeting it soon.

Fixated as he is on running and not passing out, Sirius almost trips over the worn stone steps that rise up into darkness above him. He leaps up three at a time but quickly the stitch in his side becomes unbearable; he plods up and up, every breath stabbing, staring ahead. Any second, any second— he’s got to catch his breath before he reaches whatever's up there, he may have to run for it. He's barely had the thought before he feels his head smack into something hard. Cursing, he feels around and finds a flat wood something: a trapdoor. He presses his ear to the wood, trying to make out any kind of clue as to what's beyond. Nothing.

_To hell with it_ , he thinks, and flings the thing open.

Sirius throws himself through the opening, wand lifted in self-defense, but there's no one here. He's in a cellar, full of dust and crates, dim and low-ceilinged. There's a wooden staircase leading upstairs. He can hear voices clearly from the ground floor but he doesn't have time to think about how stupid this is, about what'll happen when whoever it is sees somebody pop out of their cellar, so he plunges ahead and up the stairs to the door. The voices grow even clearer, and there’s the tinkling of a bell above a shop door; he's in a shop, then. Which?

Only one way to find out. He throws the door open.

Honeydukes, of all places. Sirius finds himself behind the counter, registers the rows of sweets and browsing customers. Then he notices that he's emerged right next to the lady standing behind the counter, a plump middle-aged woman he recognises as one of the owners, who, currently, looks extremely shocked.

"Who're you?" she demands. “How’d you get down there?”

Sirius doesn't hang round to answer. He books it out from behind the counter, smashes square into a woman and her small daughter, totters off-balance and, dizzy, takes off again, only to smack into a huge barrel of Every Flavour Beans. It rocks ominously for a second, topples with a heavy _clunk,_ and sends several thousand Every Flavour Beans rushing over the floor in a rainbow deluge. The shopkeeper shouts and somebody trips in the wake of the bean flood, and in the commotion Sirius makes a break for it.

He tears down the sunny street, ignoring the curious looks of passers-by. He realises that he's courting expulsion even more closely than ever, and possibly arrest; does it count as breaking and entering if there's a trapdoor involved? Somehow he doesn't imagine Professor McGonagall would appreciate the subtleties. Second wind overtaking him, Sirius runs faster.

Past the post office, past the Three Broomsticks, up the slope outside of the village proper...and there it is. Sirius is vaulting over the crumbling fence to the Shrieking Shack, derelict and creepy-looking even in daylight, before he fully registers that he very well might die in a couple of minutes.

 

***

 

From behind Remus in the cramped passage comes James’ breathless voice: “I’m getting deja vu.”

"Sirius had better be as easy to drag back as Snape,” Remus says as he dodges a low-hanging root. He’s hit his head on the ceiling twice already as he barrels through the tunnel, barely noticing what’s in front of him.

“Look on the bright side!” says James desperately. "This time isn’t _certain_ death!”

Remus isn’t having it. “The potion wasn't right, I'm sure of it! You lot slipped up somewhere!”

"Well," Peter calls from the back, "it was only a _bit_ bluer than it was supposed to be, maybe that doesn't mean—”

"Hurry up!” Remus snaps. He leads them through the dark tunnel as fast as he can, which is maddeningly slow: having to run crouched over isn't the most efficient way of travel even when his body isn’t aching from a god-awful moon. He drags his sore leg behind him like a lead weight, paws at the earth walls to stay upright until his hands are caked with dirt, willing himself past the pain, forward, forward—

“How much of a head start did he have?” Remus pants.

“I dunno, five minutes?” James’ voice climbs an octave in panic. “Eight? Ten? I dunno!”

A hot spike of guilt shoots through the near-hysterical fear in Remus’ chest. There’s no way around it: it’s his fault they’re falling behind. It was so bloody stupid; in the whole litany of stupid things Remus has done in his life this is the worst and no matter how it turns out he’ll never forgive himself. He could've ensured they got there sooner, it would’ve been _easy_ , he made a decision in a split second of weakness and stupidity and now the consequences are slamming down on him heavier than his aching body as he hauls it through the tunnel. But it’s too late to go back now. All he can do is run faster.

He feels sick to his stomach. What has he done?

 

***

 

Dying’s a possibility, of course.

There's a good chance Remus was right about the looks of the catalyst potion being a sign that they'd done the spell wrong. Sirius hadn't wanted to accept it at the time, after they’d worked so hard and he was so bloody irritated at the prospect of a do-over, but of course it's possible. It’s one of the most difficult magical undertakings known to wizardkind, and they started when they were thirteen. Screwing it up the first time round isn’t too much of a stretch. So, yeah, it's within the realm of possibility that Sirius might attempt this only to be turned into a shapeless blob, or something half-human half-dog, or maybe just a puddle of blood and hair…he stops thinking about the details. It could happen.

But as he points his wand at the boarded up door and cries, "Reducto!" he finds that he doesn't especially care. He’s struck with the electrifying thought that every stupid risk he’s ever taken in his life has been rehearsal for this one. It’d make sense. Their lives have tripled in intensity this past term. All of their fights, their relationships, their rivalries, the consequences thereof— something about fifth year cranked up the volume on all of it.

Sirius crosses the threshold, trying to remember when everything got so bloody high stakes. Weren't they kids just a few seconds ago? It feels like only weeks since they were fretting about gossip and squabbling over girls and arguing about the score in their ongoing card game. How did everything turn life or death? Snape almost died because of Sirius, Remus might die if Sirius doesn't do this thing which might cause _Sirius’_ death, in which case Remus might still die anyway. He wonders if this is how the lives of other school kids generally go.

_Doubtful_ , Sirius thinks, crossing the rotting floorboards toward the rickety cupboard shoved into the corner. He throws open the door, which creaks like something dying, and sees it, right where they left it: the large flask, coated in a thin layer of dust. He takes it, unstoppers it, raises it to his mouth.

Here in the last moment, Sirius waits for the fear. Has it hit him yet? He looks for it, examining himself. He tastes the metal lip of the flask, inhales a smell like freshly extinguished ash from its contents. His heart beats so hard it might break his ribs, and he’s sweaty and rattled and gasping for breath, but…nah, mostly he’s just thinking about Remus.

Any second now Sirius will swallow this potion that might kill him, but for some reason all he can think about are those nights first year when Remus would wake him up out of nightmares, real or pretend, and keep him company until they fell asleep. Even here in the dark Shack the memories are warm and bright and clear. He remembers perfectly: Remus trying to talk down a poltergeist, Remus describing his pirate ship in a whisper, Remus not blaming the wolf who bit him, Remus being clever and kind and privately wicked in that way he’s always been, even as an eleven-year-old. And Sirius remembers himself, too: up to his neck in falling in love, too young to understand what was happening. Too young to handle it even if he had, like he still is now, because it’s a cruel trick the universe pulls in not caring how old you are, not always waiting till you’re grown up to saddle you with something like that. Love has a way of making things high stakes. Maybe it’s always been life or death, then.

He's not afraid.

"Cheers," Sirius mutters to himself. He drinks.

 

***

 

The tunnel starts to rise. Remus' heart hammers desperately against his ribs, he can think nothing besides _Oh God oh God oh God, it can’t be too late, please don’t let us be too late,_ and as he surges forward he shouts, “Come on!” But they're already on top of each other in the narrow passage and James' trainer catches the hem of Remus' robe, sending him face-first into the tunnel floor. He’s up again in a split second, wandlight swinging convulsively, ignoring the sting and the vertigo as red splotches burst behind his eyelids in the dark— the light is getting closer, it’s _right there_ in front of them. From far behind he hears James' voice and it's as frantic as Remus feels: “IF HE’S NOT DEAD, I’LL KILL HIM!”

Remus’ hands find the crate at the opening, only halfway covering it. He shoves it aside, hauls himself up, and, heart in his throat, tumbles out onto the dusty floor of the Shack. He leaps to his feet without a glance around for James and Peter, spinning wildly. He's not here— but he’s got to be here—

"SIRIUS!" he screams. "Sirius, Sirius oh my God, you're here somewhere, you're not…you’re not…”

But he could be. He had a head start and they could be too late, maybe he was here but _isn’t_ now, maybe it’s just what’s left of him, and even as Remus' stomach simultaneously drops out of his body and lurches up into his throat he lowers his eyes to the floor, fearing the worst—

He hears it before he sees it, over by the cupboard: movement from the far corner. Remus whirls around, and all his breath leaves him. Something huge is stepping out of the shadows.

The shaggy black dog raises its head and bounds across the room, enormous paws pounding the floorboards, and on instinct Remus staggers back. It's bigger than any dog he's ever seen: big enough to be a bear at a glance, wild-looking enough to make Remus’ breath catch when it charges him. But it stops short in front of him, so close that he can feel its hot breath, sits down on its hind legs, and stares at him with pale grey eyes. Familiar eyes.

And then the dog is gone. In its place sits Sirius, crouched back on his heels, looking up at Remus from under his hair. He grins, wide and shining.

"You know what's weird?" Sirius says casually. "Colour-blindness. Colour-blindness is weird."

There's a racket from behind them: James and Peter tripping over each other as they fall into the Shack. They look up, Peter gasps, and James cries, "PADFOOT!"

Sirius stands and turns his grin on them. "Yeah, I'm alive. Too bad for you sods."

“Could fucking murder you, I could!" James pants as he disentangles himself from Peter. They both clamber to their feet, gasping for breath.

"What happened?" Peter breathes. His eyes are wide on Remus. "You stopped him?"

Sirius looks at Remus. "Well, Moony? You wanna tell them or shall I?”

Remus can't speak.

Sirius shrugs. “If you say so.”

He turns on his heel. Remus blinks and sees the enormous dog again, jet black and formidable and, at the moment, leaping forward and barking happily.

James explodes. He throws his arms around Peter, who’s white with shock, and jumps up and down. "Holy fuck!” he cries. “Holy fuck, holy fuck, _holy fuck!_ ” The last 'holy fuck' cracks, and James swings an arm from around Peter’s shoulders to swipe over his face.

Sirius pops into human form again, already laughing at James. "Are you crying?"

"Shut _up_ , you _dick!_ ” James blurts in a watery sort of shout, beaming as he lands punches across Sirius’ chest. "You _know_ I'm a happy crier!"

Sirius laughs harder. Peter, meanwhile, is stock still. A slow smile spreads over his stunned face. "It's...it's safe? It worked?"

"Two hundred percent," Sirius announces. He picks up the flask and holds it out. "You can have the first go-- James is busy with his manful tears."

Peter finally laughs. James clearly fights a grin even as he pulls out his wand and slashes it at Sirius. “You’re a DICK!”

There's a flash of light, Sirius is hauled into the air by the ankle, and the flask drops to the floor with a _clank_. James stoops to grab it. With eyes bright in his reddened, grinning face, he unstoppers the flask and raises it to Remus.

“Moony,” he declares, “to your health."

 

***

 

_Smell of fabric, smell of dust. Feel through folds, feel edges soft and worn and textured, prickly wool smooth cotton, smell of skin and sweat and leather, feel edge of a shoe. Leather smell, plastic smell, sweat skin dirt, shoe sole grass stone wood carpet dirt, strong like human and heat; feel along edges, following with feeling. Too blurry too dark to see, but he doesn't need to see._

_Smell of wood smell of wood and then edge, flick through crack in wardrobe door onto floor, new wood smell, different human smell, swarm of smells, sniff them out nose to floor and nose to air: fabric carpet ink tea hair cardboard spiderweb metal rain ceramic vinyl paper parchment plastic citrus glue smoke, gamy like skin and alkaline like toothpaste, follow floor to something burnt-smelling, round and mellow like wax, somebody’s spilled a candle, two or three weeks ago. Over there, different burn smell, follow it, woody and green and spicy and papery, somebody’s dropped a joint._

_Stinging antiseptic bite of a cleaning spell, keep wandering, smell something new— sharp and deep and briny like something green rotting, somebody brought in forest floor on their shoe. Toward the dim blur of a bedstead, follow the wood smell cottony smell salty smell, into the dark underneath, dust and dust and dust, different types of dust, dust can smell so many ways, thousands of smells in dust, follow to an a new blur: books, paper smell, ink and skin and fingernail, wander on. Out again. Something sharp, something brackish, soap and a spot of oil and graphite, spot of petroleum, cool and sharp spot, somebody dropped a mint candy, months ago—_

_Sound, loud sound, loud and booming and layered, footstep and vibration and voice, explode of smell: human, clothes, shoes, hair, fire and carpet and stone and leather of the common room and stone and dust of the stairs, faint metal and wood:_

_"Pete, we gotta go!”_

_Blur above, heat incoming, thin blur— wand, smell of wood, smell of skin, smell of old blood and flesh and faint scale and faint fire— dragon heartstring—_

_Blue flash, bright bright bright—_

Peter blinks hard, adjusting to the onslaught of bright colour. It’s been over two weeks since they finished the spell, but turning back is still disorienting. "Sorry.”

"We're gonna be the last ones out there, c'mon."

He follows James out of their dormitory and onto the stairs. “Not that I blame you,” James says. “I’d transform all the time if I had more space, you’re right lucky you’re tiny. Hey, which colours can you see?”

“Er…blue and green? Grey? No reds or oranges.”

“Yeah, same. Does stuff look really _shiny_ to you?”

“Maybe? Sort of just blurry.”

James hums. “Yeah, mine’s blurry too. Let’s hope Padfoot’s got it better, we’re screwed if _none_ of us can see for shite.”

He opens the stairwell door and leads them into the common room, where Sirius and Remus stand waiting. “Do you see red?” James asks.

“Have once or twice.”

“When you’re a dog, tosser.”

“Nah. Why?”

“Trying to work out how blind we are collectively.”

“Sort of blurry,” Sirius says.

“Oh, just wait until you’re in the dark,” Remus tells Sirius. “You and I have great night vision. The sense of smell makes up for everything else anyway. I don’t know about deer, though,” he says to James, apologetic.

“Canines,” James grumbles to himself. “Will be the death of me.”

Remus claps him on the shoulder. “We’re your hounds, Actaeon.”

“All you do is talk nonsense at me.” He waves them all forward toward the portrait hole. “C’mon, we’re already late.”

They join the rest of the stragglers gathered in the Entrance Hall to leave for the Hogsmeade trip and join the slow-moving line out the doors. Filch stands at the threshold and glares down at his list of names while Mrs Norris slinks between people’s ankles. She stops in front of James and stares at him with her lamp-like eyes. Peter had never seen a cat look suspicious until he encountered Mrs Norris.

“What d’you reckon, Black?” James mutters under his breath. “Think she’d fancy meeting Padfoot?”

Peter shakes his head. “I don’t think she’d buy it.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t think it works on cats,” he whispers. “Tesla definitely knows I’m me. At least that I’m not a rat, anyway.”

“How do you reckon that?” asks Sirius.

“I haven’t been eaten, that’s how.”

It’s a brisk but sunny May morning. The four walk down the Hogsmeade High Street, weaving through crowds of students and villagers out enjoying the sunshine.

“Pretty boring, now, isn’t it?” James says. “These scheduled visits? I feel bad for all these poor sods who can’t pop over anytime they like.”

“Say that a little louder, why don’t you?” 

“Fine, fine. Sort of a drag we can’t brag about it, though.” James dutifully lowers his voice. “We found a _secret passageway!_ ”

“ _I_ found a secret passageway, dickhead.”

“Did you? Or did your little brother _tell you directly_ and then you spent a thousand years thinking it over?”

They bicker about it a bit longer, as is normal lately. James’ joy when Sirius told them about the passageway through the witch statue was overwhelming, second only to his frustration that they could’ve gotten to it six months ago. Peter tunes out.

He’s caught by surprise when James veers off from the well-trodden route to the Three Broomsticks. Beckoning them along, he cuts around the side of the pub and starts up the grassy slope away from the village proper.

Remus groans. “Really, Prongs?”

“I just wanna look at it!”

“You’ll be seeing enough of it next week.”

“A whole _week_ ,” Sirius complains. “I can’t stand this waiting!”

“Six days,” Remus mumbles. “But who’s counting?”

They reach the top of the hill, suspended from the bustle of the village and fading on one side into thick forest. James leads the way down to the crumbling fence and hops up onto a somewhat sturdy-looking beam, the better to gaze at the Shack. It’s dark and eerie against the blue sky, boarded windows like missing teeth in a crooked smile.

Peter knows it isn’t actually haunted, obviously, but the sight of it sends chills down his spine. Remus, with his eyes trained firmly on the ground, seems to feel similarly. Sirius and James, however, look elated.

“Six days, lads!” James crows. “Six more days, and then all our hard work will pay off!”

“Reckon you can take a werewolf? Even deer-you is scrawny.”

James shoves off from the fence to hook Sirius into a headlock. Sirius swings back and swats James’ glasses into the dirt.

“ _You’ll pay for that, Black!_ ”

The two grapple while Peter and Remus share a look. The miraculously repaired friendship between James and Sirius is a welcome relief, but it has lead to a lot more of his and Remus’ old pastime of standing around while the other two roughhouse like energetic toddlers.

“Well, you’ve looked at it now,” Remus says. “Want to head to Honeydukes?”

The both of them look up at the same time, Sirius halfway to the ground trying to take out James’ ankles.

“Oh, yeah,” says James. “Good idea.” He frees himself from Sirius’ grip. “Race you!”

Sirius is off like a shot down the hill, Remus following behind at a stroll, but James stays put. Peter opens his mouth, confused, but James cuts him off with a smile.

“I’m a genius, Wormtail.”

“Er,” says Peter.

“One week to our first full moon adventure, yes?”

“Six days.”

“Whatever,” James says. “We can’t have it ruined by this bogus little spat of theirs.”

“Well—”

“We’re gonna need total unity for Operation Animagus or it won’t be any fun at all.”

“And we might die.”

“Yeah, that. So, you see my plan.”

“Er,” says Peter.

“Leaving them alone together! We’ll make ourselves scarce, they’ll be forced to hang out together and fix things. Bam.”

“Er.” Peter very much doubts it’ll be that easy. “You think it’ll be that easy?”

James rakes a hand through his hair, dismissive. “I’ve forgiven him, haven’t I? Stupid sod risked his life, it was a _gesture_ , and that rot. I can’t stay angry with him after that. He did the shittiest thing I’ve ever heard of but that’s water under the bridge now, isn’t it?”

“It— it, er. It might not be that easy for Moony, maybe?”

“But it’s different now. We’re _Animagi_ now.”

“I, er. I guess.”

He swings an arm around Peter’s shoulders. “Let’s go to the Three Broomsticks or something. We’ll dodge them and they’ll make up and be pals again, you just watch. Never even know they’ve been set up.”

 

***

 

Five minutes into a fruitless search around the packed sweet shop, Remus says, “They’ve ditched us on purpose, haven’t they?”

“Yeah, I reckon so,” Sirius says.

“Oh.” He’d really like to kill James. He _meant_ well, Remus is sure, he just had no idea about the added level of uncomfortable layered onto this situation.

“You can split if you like,” Sirius says with a shrug. “I’ll make your excuses.”

“Thanks.”

“Want to take the passage back? It’ll be quicker.”

“No, no, I, er…” Remus looks out past the shop window toward the High Street. It’s packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people, and the path back to school is winding and uneven and his knees are really bothering him… “I ought to take the proper way back. What sort of prefect am I?”

Sirius lifts an eyebrow. “I think we’ve established the answer to that.” He’s smiling at him now, something that’s happened exceedingly rarely since February, and Remus looks longer than is wise. The coppery light of the shop softens the ink-and-paper sharpness of him, warms the wintry grey of his eyes.

Distantly, Remus acknowledges the ache in his chest.

He caves. “Fine.”

The smile sharpens to a familiar grin. It’s unnecessary in the din of the crowded shop for Sirius to lean in close to Remus’ ear to avoid being overheard, but he does it anyway. “I’ll distract them, you go for the door.”

A display of Ice Mice magically floating off the counter and clattering to the floor in a flurry of squeaks is as good a diversion as any, and Remus slips past the man at the register undetected. He wasn’t expecting Sirius to follow him down into the cellar, but he’s there when Remus opens the door.

Remus jumps. “How’d you do that?”

The smile again, too close on the narrow staircase. “I’m full of surprises.”

They shuffle down the stairs into the cellar. Sirius ducks between two crates to pat around on the dusty floor, and Remus says, “I’m a bit offended you think I can’t manage on my own.”

But Sirius is already pulling up the trapdoor from an identical stretch of floor. “You can’t ever find it. It’s the prefect in you.”

“Thought I was a rotten prefect.”

“Rotten prefect’s still a prefect.”

They stand there for a moment in the dim, dusty-smelling cellar. Sirius stays holding open the trapdoor, so Remus has to sidle right up next to him to step down into the dark passageway. His foot has only just hit the top step, though, when Sirius says, “I wanted to ask you about something.”

Remus turns his head, and it’s a mistake. They’re very close together now. “What?”

“The mirror passageway. We never did follow it, did we?”

His face goes hot. It’s the first either of them have alluded to _before_ in months. Remus wishes they weren’t so very alone. “Suppose we never got around to it.”

“I thought about using it when I was going for the potion, when I was trying to outrun you lot.” Sirius nods at the trapdoor. “I only used this one here because I reckoned you’d tell the others about the mirror one and take it, wherever it lets out.”

“Yeah, that would’ve been clever of me.”

“I didn’t mean— don’t feel as if you’re stupid or something, for forgetting. There was quite a lot going on.”

“Yeah,” Remus says.

Remus is a good liar. He could agree with Sirius. He could say that in the pressure of the moment he forgot about the handy passageway behind the mirror that they found ages ago and how it’s so much larger and quicker to travel in. He forgot about it, and as a result he and Peter and James took the Willow tunnel and weren’t in time to stop Sirius from drinking the potion. It’s an easy lie and Sirius would never think to question it.

He can’t bring himself to tell it.

“I didn’t forget about it. I knew it would’ve been the faster option, and we might’ve beaten you there if we’d used it, but I didn’t tell the others it existed.” His stomach heaves with the guilt. “It was a split second decision and I took the risk.”

“Why didn’t you tell them?”

“It was a moment of weakness. Just…sentiment, and I regret it. It was a stupid mistake, and I’m grateful that the consequences weren’t worse.”

“Sentiment.” Sirius watches him, unblinking. “Explain what you mean by that.”

Remus doesn’t say anything.

“That passageway was our secret,” Sirius says, slow. “You didn’t tell James and Peter because you didn’t want to spoil our place.”

“I told you it was stupid.”

Remus’ eyes are fixed on the square of darkness below, but he hears Sirius step even closer. He can feel his body heat, hear his breaths come.

“What am I to take away from that?”

“Nothing. It was a moment of weakness and I wish you’d forget it happened.”

“You kept our secret snogging tunnel a secret! You can’t ask me to forget something like that!”

His ever-fraying patience snaps, and he finally meets Sirius’ eyes. “I’m asking you to cut me some slack!” Remus hisses. “You know it’s hard on me, I wish you wouldn’t try to make it harder.”

“But _you’re_ the one who—!”

“No, we’re not…” Remus brings the heels of his hands to his eyes, digs in. Exhales. “I refuse to have this argument. I’ve forgiven you. There’s no reason we can’t be civil.”

“Civil,” Sirius repeats.

Remus nods. He’s got to get out of this dark cellar with Sirius, where he’s forced to stand close and where he can’t not _smell_ him, and isn’t it odd what an impact that has? There’s a particular scent Sirius has got that Remus can’t call up in his memory just by thinking about it but damn near bowls him over every time he gets a breath of the thing itself, just as it always did in the time before, because that smell is strongest in the crook of Sirius’ neck and the soft thrumming heat of his throat, which is information that Remus cannot unlearn. He read something once about how smell is the sense most closely tied with memory and it makes sense, that, because it always happens these days that whenever he stands close enough to pick up that smell he has the same moment of reeling, heart-pounding vertigo while it all comes rushing back, every moment of _before_ , raw and real as the day it happened.

“I’ll see you later,” he says. He ducks his head, climbs down the stone steps, and lets the darkness settle around him.

 

***

 

“What’s the score?”

“Who cares?” James says. He drops the cards Remus has just dealt him in favour of standing up from the dormitory floor and rushing over the window for the thousandth time this evening. “Won’t be long now.”

“I’m glad you lot are excited, at least,” Remus mumbles.

Peter, personally, thinks that’s a bit of a stretch; the feeling churning in his stomach and threatening to make him lose his dinner isn’t much like _excitement_. After two years of hard work, he thought he’d be ecstatic now that the day’s finally come. Instead, he finds himself quite jealous of everybody down in the common room, studying for next month’s exams or lounging around by the fire as if this were any ordinary Friday night.

It isn’t an ordinary Friday night.

Sirius doesn’t seem to be experiencing the same terror, though (Of course he isn’t, Peter thinks bitterly). Upsetting Tesla from his lap, Sirius too gets to his feet and joins James at the window. Eyes fixed on the rising moon, he asks, “How much longer?”

“About an hour,” Remus answers. “Peter, do you remember the score?”

“We were losing.”

“Duh,” says James. He picks up Carlos from the windowsill, letting her roll up and down the length of his arm while he stares out at the moon. “But forget that. Is it just me or is it a funny colour?”

Peter cranes his neck. Sure enough, the full moon hanging just above the black silhouette of the Dark Forest is a murky yellow-brown. Remus, however, doesn’t raise his eyes from the cards in his hand to say, “Partial lunar eclipse tonight. Blood moon. It’ll be red by midnight.”

At the rather impressive words _blood moon_ , James and Sirius turn from the window to grin at each other.

“Far out,” says James.

“Wicked,” agrees Sirius.

Quietly, Remus says, “There was one the night I was bitten.”

The room goes silent. James almost drops Carlos.

Remus speaks to his cards. “It was so bright it woke me up— bright as a traffic light. I…” He swallows. “I went outside to look at it.”

There’s a long pause in which everybody stares at Remus. Even James is dumbstruck. Peter’s stomach has fallen somewhere into the vicinity of his toes, and Sirius is white as paper. Finally, Remus sighs.

“I just hope you lot realise what you’ve signed up for.”

It seems necessary that James should be the one to respond to this. He walks over from the window and drops down onto the floor next to Remus. He knocks their shoulders together.

“We’d do it again, mate.”

 

***

 

It's the longest fifteen minutes of Sirius' life, waiting in the dormitory before following Remus.

James is antsier than ever. "Can't we just go? We'll be under the Cloak, it'll—”

"Even the Cloak won't stop Pomfrey running into us,” Sirius points out. "How would you like to have done all this work and then ruin it by getting detention?"

James, forced to admit that he's right, sulks.

Finally, _finally_ , they set off from Gryffindor Tower under the Cloak. It's a hard feat these days, hiding all three of them, but their way down to the front doors is blessedly clear. They stumble, invisible, out onto the dark front lawn. Sirius gasps and hears the others do the same: the moon is deep orange and enormous in the vast black sky, burning a long yellow stripe across the surface of the lake. The grounds are otherworldly in the eerie, reddish light. Sirius feels very small.

"Alright, lads," breathes James. "Ready?"

They cross the silent grounds to the shadow of the Willow, stirring the night air with its gnarled branches like waving fists, and James nods at Peter. "Wormtail, do the honours?"

Peter gives a nervous smile, breathes in, and vanishes; Sirius catches a glimpse of something small rippling through the grass ahead, sees a grey shape climb onto the roots of the Willow. The tree creaks to a halt. Beneath the Cloak, James beams at Sirius. "Ready, Pads?"

"Born ready."

They surface in the Shack, lit wands flashing shadows over the broken furniture.

"Where d'you reckon he is?" asks Peter in a whisper. Sirius doesn't know what it is-- there's nobody around to hear them, and they always spoke at full volume here before-- but something about the Shack tonight feels sacred, unbreakably silent. A sepulchral stillness.

"Upstairs, I s'pose,” murmurs James. “C’mon."

They cross into the shadowy corridor, climb single-file up the rickety stairs and onto the dusty landing. There's a single door leading off it. Sirius is holding his breath; he doesn't know why. James opens the door.

It's anticlimactic for reasons Sirius doesn't understand to see that, of course, it's just Remus there. He sits on the floor in his boxers, the patchwork of scars carved into his bare torso gleaming silver. The room is cast in black and sepia with the moon a reddish blur behind a film of dark clouds, glowing through a single unboarded window. Remus looks up at them and smiles, a quiet thing.

James inclines his head, faux-proper. "Fancy seeing you here, Mister Moony."

Remus breathes a laugh. Sirius has the impression that he can't manage much else.

The three of them sit down on the floor in front of the dusty four-poster, forming a semi-circle before Remus. The house creaks like a living thing. The very dust of the place seems to hold its breath.

Predictably, James is the one to break the silence.

”You wear your pants for these things? "

Remus makes a face. "This floor is splintery."

"Oh," says James, bemused. Then: “Good Godric, man, how often do you have to buy new pants?"

"Not the time, Prongs," Sirius mutters. James nods, sheepish.

The smoky clouds slip away on a breeze. The full moon is left bare, burning red, and the breath falls out of Sirius' lungs.

Remus peers up at it. An odd expression crosses over his face as he gets slowly to his feet. "It seems too bright to be real, doesn't it?" he murmurs, eyes on the window. "I still have trouble believing it sometimes. 'No, that can't be real. Nothing can really look like that.' But it's up there, every month. Like a big halogen bulb, a billion watts. A trillion..."

Something changes. A creak of a floorboard, a breath lost in the throat, the hair standing up on the back of Sirius’ neck; a cosmic shift. A shudder runs through Remus.

James stands and the others follow suit. "Moony?"

“Changed my mind," Remus gasps.

“What?”

"I don't want you here, get out quickly, you've got time if you hurry--" Remus' voice cracks and cuts off as he doubles over at the waist, as though someone invisible's punched him in the stomach. “Go on, it’ll be fine--"

"Are you mad?" James cries. "We're not leaving now!"

"We know what we signed up for," Sirius says.

But something frantic’s overtaken Remus; he shakes his head over and over. "You don't, you don't, you don't," he says, pleads, sounding much younger than sixteen. He’s got his arms wrapped tight around himself, knuckles gone white and nails digging in as his whole body wracks with tremors, like he’d keep himself from exploding, and Sirius has never seen that look on his face, nowhere close. His voice cracks down the middle on, "You've no _idea_.”

It’s his voice that does it. That voice Sirius knows so well, that's always calm and polite and mature no matter what, the voice that’s talked him down from nightmares— it’s wrecked with terror and Sirius is so afraid he thinks he'll throw up.

James keeps going. “We're not leaving! We've come this far! We're going to be with you and that was decided ages ago, so— so— deal with it!"

A horrible sound heaves its way out of Remus and he crumbles to the floor. Face hidden in the crook of one twitching arm, Remus breathes. Sirius shakes; hears his own hammering heart.

In a voice that’s soft like giving up, Remus says, "Alright…alright. Stand back."

James grabs Sirius' arm with one hand and Peter’s with the other and drags them backwards. Bony, scar-furrowed shoulders rising and falling, Remus pushes himself to his feet once again. He faces the window. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.

Finally he looks round at them again. Sirius chokes back a noise when he sees his eyes: the iris is gone. There's nothing but empty black disks set in the white, all the brown eaten up by cavernous pupil. The horror of it crosses into grotesque with Remus' expression, how incongruously apologetic he looks.

“Alright.” Gently, he says, "This will be frightening."

Something shifts. A bone cracks. Bathed in bloody moonlight, Remus throws back his head and screams.

***

 

_The wolf tears his way to the surface and he is angry— he is always angry—_

_But tonight, tonight tonight tonight under the gory red moon red like the blood he pulls up from under his own skin because warm, hot blood blood hot BLOOD, he's insatiable, rage-hungry he is rage and the red moon, he is only anger and blood tonight, as he has been but time is nothing to him what came before is nothing or what will come after, the world will spin to an end and he will want only BLOOD—_

_He rips his way out of the skin that isn't his like it’s nothing this cage of bone and skin that crushes him in for so so so long so so so HUNGRY until the moon but now the moon is HIS again and now he's free, his feet hit the ground that isn't earth-- he is angry, he want wants he wants, he longs for the pull of the earth beyond this cage they keep him in this wood this rot this tiny dim dark prison but he can smell the air beyond he can smell the dirt and the trees and he-- he-- he smells BLOOD--_

_HUMANS THERE WERE HUMANS HERE HE SMELLS THEY WERE HERE_

_he will find them he will TEAR them bite jaws teeth drink their blood blood hot BLOOD HOT BLOOD! feel it warm on his teeth after so long so so LONG HUNGRY BLOOD HE SMELLS BLOOD—_

_but the smell is old—_

_Something else here foreign different warm but not what he wants something-- different-- intruding, but what he doesn't know, turns around, claws grinding the wood in the red light, and what are they? Two large shapes like him but they aren't at all but they aren't human he has no use for them, ignore them, because the longing the horrible need the screaming need for blood, he lifts his claws and sinks them into his own flesh and oh relief, deep deep scratch scratch pull like he can't pull at that smell that he still SMELLS human smell where is it?! He howls, claws deeper, but--_

_The thing, one of the things that isn't human and isn't him, big and dark like him and shaped like him but not--_

Dog _, says the tiny weak frail thing that lives inside him, but this isn't its time, the light in the sky's crushed him down into their shared bones and the wolf has this body now, shove him down again--_

Dog _, the thing, smelling like blood and hair but not human pushes him down, it has claws and teeth like he does, it pulls his claws away from the soft give of his own flesh from the blood from the heat tackles him to the rotting wood-- NO what is it what is this thing it doesn't belong here, he howls, teeth and claws will dig into this thing push it back but it fights back it tackles him again--_

_A second one, something else big but not like him at all, smells wrong and not like him with big sharp branches from its head, charges and leaps push and back and forth and floor and stand and claws and howl draw them back but they push forward and he rolls on his back stands again on feet on claws will BITE but they overpower him, he howls and howls and howls but then_

_something_

Surfaces _\--_

_The tiny frail thing in him that he beats back bites back, breathes--_

_He is the wolf but he is is is something too, something that knows these intruders who smell wrong, something that knows-- knows his own name--_ He has a name _— he doesn’t know it—_ He has friends— _he doesn’t know what_ friends _are—_

_He frees his jaws from around his leg unearths his teeth_

_Hurting himself--_ he doesn't have to _—his teeth don't ache for blood he feels he feels he feels_

_strange_

_The new things the big things the intruders-- intruders? are they?_ He knows them _, he thinks he does— push him, snap at him with jaws hooves paws what is this he doesn't know it but it quiets something in him something that wants to bite but he doesn't have to bite--_

_The thing inside him surfaces again, gasps a breath,_ He has a name _\--_

_He knows what_ stairs _are when the big thing with the hard tall sharps on its head pulls him down them he knows what a door is, he smells rot and wood and fabric and hateful hateful he's angry he doesn't want them he wants dirt and trees and grass and moonlight it's dark and horrible here where he's always been trapped forever he aches and he—_

_He smells something else twining around his paws, running scurrying a small smell but there and fast and strong-- another, another intruder—_ but they aren't intruders, they're with him _— he follows the small thing through the room, follows it in a circle, it's like a_ game _, he knows what a_ game _is_

_but the wood floor the dark the smell the wrong smell the game doesn't help, he doesn't need blood he doesn't need to bite but oh how he aches, he howls screams in desperate misery this place is wrong, this dark prison they've kept him in for so so so so so long his whole life in the dark never knowing the moon the air the earth in the center of him—_

_New smell--_

_HUMAN SMELL HUMAN SMELL HE TURNS THERE IT IS MAN RIGHT THERE HUMAN SMELL HE RUNS TO BITE TO TEAR TO SHRED YES YES YES YES BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD_

_the MAN the dark-haired MAN where the big sharp-headed intruder was takes something in its hand and the door bursts and HUMAN SMELL NIGHT SMELL AIR SMELL he LEAPS--_

_He lands on the intruder with the branches for a head the thing from before the human is gone the man is gone again the wolf screams his grief, so close— But the NIGHT--_

_He breaks through the open door and_

_THE AIR!_

_Oh the AIR oh the sound and the night and the big red moon! The three things the three new smells follow behind and he barely notices because finally FINALLY--_

_The moon and the dirt and the trees and the sky and the cool cool air on his fur the taste of the moon on his tongue the grass and the wet and the soil and the damp under his paws that beat beat beat the ground as he RUNS-- oh to RUN-- RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN. Everything, everything, everything they've kept from him in his dark cage and now the whole wheeling world big and round and full and FREE, he is FREE! Behind him the shape that is most like him barks gives a cry like victory but he ignores it, the moonlight—_

_the light the light the LIGHT!—_

_He lifts his eyes to his moon his mother his light the center of him that he feels even from inside his cage he finds it with his eyes and it's everything, it's everything, and for the first time he knows joy, fierce hot swelling bursting BLOOD RED joy—_

_He howls._

 

_***_

 


	4. black and blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Did you like question ten, Moony?"

_***_

 

“Moony? Moony?”

He’s somewhere. There’s something on his face and a voice from very far away.

“Come on Moony, come on— ground control to Remus, come on—”

The thing on his face slaps him. He’s lying on something cold, or is it damp? He opens his eyes, hazy. The first thing he sees is Sirius’ face, beaming. It takes him a second to notice what’s behind it. Trees?

It all comes back at once.

He jolts upright so fast that his head swims dizzily. With so much feeling that some birds flutter out of a tree overhead, he shouts, “ _Fuck!_ ”

Sirius tips over in surprise, falling against his hands on the forest floor. “Take it ea—”

“You let me out!” Remus cries at James, who’s sitting on a stump beside him, casual as anything. “You let me out of the Shack while I was—while I was— what the _absolute fuck_ is wrong with you?!”

James just sniggers, which makes Remus want to strangle him even more than he already did. Which is saying something, as the sole thing keeping Remus from attacking him right this second is the loss of feeling in his left arm. It’s bleeding quite a bit.

“You were dying to go outside,” James says. “Poor thing— you wanted to run around!”

“I wanted to run around because I wanted to fucking _bite people!_ ” Remus screams, hoarse around his sore throat.

“Did you, though?” Sirius asks. “You got less vicious as the night went on.” He turns to Peter for backup. “He did, don’t you think?”

“Yeah…you…y-you…” He’s staring at Remus, struggling to make sounds.

“Thanks for the analysis, Wormtail,” James says breezily. He looks to Remus again. “Admit it, you had fun.”

“Fun?! This isn’t about fun, it’s…it’s…” Remus trails off. The shocked horror is slowly ebbing away to be replaced with a new, even less pleasant feeling: self-disgust.

Sirius laughs. “You did! Look at him— he can’t even disagree!”

For a few moments Remus gapes wordlessly, trying for an argument but capable of none.

He _did_ have fun.

“Er,” says Peter, finding his voice at last. He looks up at the sky that’s fading from deep blue into pink around the far-off mountaintops. “What time does Madam Pomfrey usually come to collect you?”

“Around sunrise,” Remus answers, distracted. He’s looking down at his body, assessing the damage or, rather, lack thereof. A single row of ragged scratches across his torso, and one bite mark on his forearm— it’s nothing. Even after the easiest moons he’s never, ever come out as unscathed as this. How on earth will he explain this to Madam Pomfrey?

“Er,” says Peter again. He points out toward the lightening horizon. “I’ve never had the greatest marks in Astronomy, but…”

It takes a second to sink in.

“ _Fuck!_ ” cries James at exactly the same moment that Sirius scrambles to his feet so quickly that he almost falls over. In a blind panic the four of them push to standing and look around, frantic, to figure out just where the bloody hell they are.

“Look!” shouts Sirius, pointing. “There’s that one hill, it goes to the school gates, so we’re just outside Hogsmeade! We cut it south through the village and we’ll make it in time!”

Remus nods, says, “Good idea,” and makes to take off through the underbrush. He’s stopped, though, by James’ hand catching him tightly by the arm.

Sometime in the last thirty seconds James has managed to take off his jeans, and he stands there in his t-shirt and pants holding them out to Remus. He gives Remus a significant raise of his eyebrows and says, “Seeing a bloke running naked and bloody down the High Street isn’t the weirdest thing these villagers have seen, I’m sure, but let’s not give them reason to be suspicious, yeah?”

 

***

 

Madam Pomfrey is surprised, to say the least.

“ _Nothing_ ,” she repeats. “Hardly anything at all! One single bite, a couple of scratches— no clawing at all, just—”

“Just the damage of my whole body ripping apart and snapping back together again?” Remus suggests.

“Don’t be smart,” she says, setting the bottle of dittany onto the bedside cabinet with a _clack_. “That’s to be expected.”

“So’s my being smart.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “I’ve never seen anything like it. All these years, you’ve always come back to me a mess.” She flings her hands, helpless. “I can’t even imagine how you’re _awake!_ You’re never awake!”

Remus shrugs. That was the plan, as they’d all established it: play dumb, deny all.

“It’s a good thing, of course,” Madam Pomfrey says. She sighs. “If a bloody confusing one.”

“I’m alright with it.”

She’s already finished mending his wounds, and seems at a loss for what to do with herself. She looks at him. Pauses. “Out of curiosity.”

“Yes?”

She narrows her eyes. “Have you…have you been…”

His stomach drops below the bedsprings. _Have I been what?_ he thinks, frantic. _Bonding with the lads over arcane sorcery?_

“…better?”

Remus blinks. “Sorry?”

“Better, have you been better?” she prompts. “Don’t act as though I don’t know you by now, boy. You’ve had a rough go of it these past months.”

Face heating, Remus says, “You’d noticed that?”

She purses her lips, re-stoppers the dittany, re-wraps a roll of bandages. “As I’m not blind or stupid, I had.” Her hands stay busy. “I remember that night. It stormed that night.”

He’s got nothing to say to that.

“Sure, I’ve been doing okay.”

She looks at him, and Remus sincerely hopes she believes him.

After a bit, she leaves him to get some rest. He feels…odd. It’s barely sunrise; he’s never been awake this early after a full before. His body hurts— aches around the edges, joints sore, wrung out— but nowhere close to the pain he usually feels when he wakes up after. Even though he’s been up all night, he has a hard time falling asleep.

It worked. The mad idea James had when he was twelve, the one Remus swore would kill them all. It worked, and Remus isn’t sure how he feels about it.

He sleeps lightly, fitfully, and wakes to voices.

“Drink the lot.”

“Oh, come _on_ —”

“Wouldn’t have to if you’d’ve come to me right away.”

“It’s a _scratch!_ ”

“And it’s been bleeding steadily since this morning!” There’s a familiar frustration in Madam Pomfrey’s voice. “A _scratch_ means something, with your condition.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

When Remus opens his eyes, he sees the screens drawn around his bed and not the owner of the voice. Doesn’t matter— he’d know that drawl anywhere. He sits up, puts his feet to the cool stone floor, and pushes the screen aside.

“Padfoot?”

Sirius looks around. He’s sitting three beds down, arms crossed over his chest. He blinks. “You’re up.”

Standing over Sirius’ bedside, Madam Pomfrey _tsks_. She sets a large, faintly smoking goblet down on the bedside cabinet, gives Sirius a look, and says, “All of it.”

With one last stern glance she turns for her office. Once the door shuts, Remus stands, crosses the room, and sits on the bed opposite Sirius. He picks up the goblet, recognising the familiar, cabbagey smell of Blood Restorative Draught.

“I’ve got to drink it too, y’know.”

“Your whole damn body pulls apart,” Sirius says, scowling. He holds up his left hand, palm out, to show a faint pink scar across the hard muscle of his thumb joint. “I nipped myself on some garden shears.”

“I’d very much prefer that were my situation.” Remus holds out the goblet.

Sirius keeps scowling, but accepts it. He takes a sip and grimaces. “That little shit.”

“Who?”

“Snivellus.”

Remus might’ve guessed. “What happened?”

“Shot a spell at me! I dodged it, hand landed on some pruning shears— was during Herbology.”

Remus looks at the clock on the wall: two o’clock in the afternoon. “Herbology was first thing this morning, you’ve let it bleed this whole time?”

“What was I gonna do, slink off to the hospital for a paper cut? Could you _imagine_ his greasy little face if I’d done that?” Sirius’ mouth twists. “‘Got to get your blood mopped up, Black, inbred freak?’”

“He said that?”

“He would’ve!”

 _You and James don’t give him opportunity to say much of anything, in these public scenes of yours,_ Remus thinks about saying. Might say, if he had the nerve. He never does.

What he does say is, “He just shot a spell at you out of nowhere during Herbology?”

“Pretty much! James was only trying out a new hex, and then Snivelly went and was a baby about it. A huge, ugly, slimy git of a baby.” Sirius rolls his eyes. “Then Evans went and got involved, and it was a whole deal. You know how James gets when she’s involved.”

He does. “But, James did hex him first?”

“Yeah, so?” Sirius shrugs. “Herbology’s dead boring, what’re we supposed to do?”

Remus should say something. After all this time, he could. What if today were the day he spoke up?

He looks at Sirius, the stubborn set of his jaw, his chilly grey eyes, and wonders if that day will ever come.

“Could’ve tried learning something. You lot could use it.”

“Wise guy.” Sirius takes another gulp of the potion, screws up his face, makes a retching sound. “Vile.”

“You wouldn’t have to drink it so often if you’d let her heal you quicker.”

Sirius shakes the hair back from his face, imperious. “Nobody else has got to do that. I won’t either. In fact—” He sets the goblet back down with a decisive _thunk_ , “I’ve had enough for today.”

"You need your blood, y'know."

"Funny," Sirius says, "I've never much cared for mine."

Remus hasn't got a good response to that.

Though he's never associated Sirius’ haemophilia with the Black family as much as he knows other people do (odd how purebloods seem to know about it automatically; dots have been connected that he didn’t grow up with), Remus has never quite grown accustomed to it. It’s unsettling how little wounds, the everyday kind that most people give no thought to, can turn into big wounds on Sirius.

Even more unsettling is how little care Sirius gives the issue. He treats it as though it were another family tradition to ignore, something else Black he can rebel into nonexistence. An exhibition in stubbornness: cuts that refuse to stop bleeding, a host who refuses to do anything about them. Remus has seen Sirius nick himself with his razor in the morning and go about the whole day with a steady, needle-fine trickle of blood running down his neck, soaking into the collar of his robes. And Remus knows that there are other things, things kept secret even from James: nosebleeds, mysterious bruising, blue-blackness around his joints where something inside bled.

Sirius does sometimes see his own body as the childhood home he’ll never run away from. Remus understands this.

“Please drink it,” Remus says.

“Why should I?”

“Because it’d make me feel better,” Remus says, more honestly than he means.

Sirius looks at him. He picks up the goblet.

 

***

 

Summer brings with it a heatwave so stifling that nobody feels like doing anything except laying around by the lake. This is especially unfortunate for the fifth years, who’re forced to spend every available second in a manic frenzy of O.W.L. revision. Sirius and James appear to be the only ones who aren’t stressed, which is very irritating to Peter, a mere mortal, who constantly feels as though he’s one review session away from a mental breakdown.

On the first of June, Sirius declares that revising is no way to spend a person’s sixteenth birthday, even if it is exam time. He and James leave Remus and Peter at their book-laden table in the common room with great enthusiasm. Peter assumes they’re going out to the grounds— past the windows the sky is a clear, cloudless blue, and the duo’s recent favourite pastime is playing fetch with Padfoot on the lawn behind the Quidditch pitch.

Peter sighs into his copy of _Achievements in Charming_ ; he still can’t keep the incantations for Colour-Change and Growth Charms straight. Remus, meanwhile, is focusing very intently on his pencil case, steering it with his wand while it does cartwheels across the table. He looks up, sees Peter’s glum expression, and says, “Cheer up. You’ve been revising for months, you’ll do fine.”

“Will not,” Peter mumbles. “I’m the worst in the year, no matter how hard I try.”

“You’re a damn sight better than I am at Arithmancy— I’ll pass that with a miracle, you could get an O in your sleep.”

Peter shrugs, watching Remus’ cartwheeling pencil case. He can hardly get his to walk in a circle. “Yeah, well.”

“Look at it this way,” Remus suggests. “No matter what, this’ll all be over in three weeks. You can look forward to that.”

“And to the full,” Peter says without thinking. He feels himself flushing. How incredibly tactless of him; he and Sirius and James may be looking forward to their next adventure two weekends from now, but he’s sure Remus isn’t. “Sorry.”

To his surprise, Remus smiles. “It’s awful, but I’m actually looking forward to it too.”

“You _are?_ ” Peter hasn’t forgotten what Remus looked like waking up in the forest afterwards, all clawed and bloody.

Remus drops his voice. “It’s odd, but there’s something about when you lot are keeping me company. It’s…it’s like…well, it’s as if my mind gets a bit less wolfish. I can remember things; there are moments when I almost remember who I am. Does that make sense?”

Smiling, Peter shakes his head. “Not a bit. But it’s good to know it was all worth it.”

“That remains to be seen,” Remus says into his notes. “Hey, have you got anything on Substantive Charms?”

 

***

 

A week and a half into O.W.L.s, and Peter is still having trouble keeping his panic in check. 

"I'm a troll," he says early Wednesday morning. He slams his book shut with such force he nearly upsets the milk jug.

“You’re not a troll,” Remus says vacantly around a mouthful of toast. He’s been a good sport about all the breakdowns, Peter’s got to hand it to him.

“I am! I know I’ve cocked up every one of them so far, _especially_ Transfiguration—”

“Can at least appreciate the irony there.”

“—and now I’m about to get a T because I’m the _worst_ at Defence and nobody will ever hire me ever!”

“Think I’ve got you beat at the unemployability,” Remus says. His voice is light even as he smashes a fried tomato with the flat of his fork, crushing it into a morose-looking pulp. “I could get a dozen O’s for all the good it’d do me.”

Peter doesn’t know what to say to that. Thankfully the moment is interrupted by James and Sirius, entering the Great Hall with their usual flare. They’re arguing about something in animated whispers. Peter reckons he knows what it is, and his suspicions are confirmed as they come within earshot.

“I’m telling you,” James says, flopping down at the table across from Peter, “there was something weird about that pig!”

Remus doesn’t look up from his tomato, which he is further decimating. “Boar,” he corrects.

“Shouldn’t it be a hog, though?” says Peter.

“Dunno, wasn’t especially warty,” Sirius quips. He picks up an abandoned _Daily Prophet_ , tears off the front page, and sets to work folding it into an airplane.

“Shut up, all of you!” James says. “I’m telling you that statue is weird! It’s hiding something!”

“Haven’t we been over this?” asks Remus.

They have. Peter opens _The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 5_ again, poring over paragraphs at random while the two keep arguing.

“Dunno why you think deer can smell better than dogs or wolves, mate—”

“Or rats,” Peter mumbles. _By its definition the counter-jinx differs from the anti-jinx, as anti-jinxes serve to prevent as opposed to remove adverse effects of—_

“None of you got as close as I did! And, I dunno, I could just tell that one of the pillars was hollow and one wasn’t, dunno if it was smell or, or what, it was like I _heard_ it almost—”

“Why would somebody put a secret passageway right on top of the bloody gates? Defeats the entire purpose, doesn’t it?”

“Does not!”

“Does too.”

“We’ve been trying to find a secret passageway for years, since the first day of school we’ve been looking for them!" James argues. "This is a lead and it’s at least worth checking out— I say we go tonight and investigate!”

Peter can practically hear Remus raise his eyebrows. “Don’t you think we do quite enough sneaking round at night as it is?”

Privately, Peter agrees. Their second full moon as a group was just three days ago. Though Remus had given some (rather weak, Peter thinks) protestations before the sun set, they’d left the Shack again, roaming even farther and running their strange, wild pack all the way down towards the Hogwarts gates. Peter had the time of his life, but he thinks going out in human form might be pushing their luck.

James snorts. “What are you, a prefect?”

“Yes?” says Remus. “I am?”

“Eh, barely.”

Peter looks up. “Wait, what’s the wand movement for a Shield Charm again?”

“You worry too much,” answers Sirius. He’s steering his newspaper airplane through the air with his wand. “Everything so far’s been a breeze.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Sirius answers with a snort and a twitch of his wand, sending the airplane dive-bombing at Peter’s face. It falls, slightly smashed, onto Miranda Goshawk’s treatise on Shield Charms.

Somebody smiles up from the folded page of the _Prophet_ , a young man. Absently, Peter flattens the airplane a bit; that face is familiar, isn’t it? It’s a fair-haired boy in Hogwarts robes, older than Peter, and yeah, he’s seen him before—

“Hey, thanks a lot,” Sirius says, affronted. He snatches up the crumpled, forlorn-looking airplane. “I was flying that. Prongs, gimme that newspaper.”

It’s no use, he’ll never get anything done here. Peter scoops up his book. Maybe if he goes someplace quiet— the courtyard’s closest— he can cram in a bit of last-minute revising, or at least quiet the pre-exam terror that’s brewing up afresh in his stomach. “See you lot in a bit.”

James rolls his eyes as he heaps eggs onto his plate. “If you don’t know the stuff now, you aren’t about to get it all in the next twenty minutes.”

He knows James is right, but he leaves with his book anyway. Maybe if he’s lucky his eyes will light on the one bit of information that gets him a D rather than a T…every point helps, he reckons…The stifling heat of the past weeks has only gotten worse, wrapping around Peter like a wool blanket when he steps out into the empty courtyard.

No, mostly empty: he feels his stomach sink as he recognises Snape’s stringy dark hair on the other side of the courtyard, sitting with his back to Peter as he bends his bony shoulders over a book. Snape hasn’t noticed him. He’s absorbed in his reading, clearly, and there’s a thick copse of bushes between them…It should be fine, right? Feeling on edge, Peter sinks down onto the nearest stone bench and keeps his head down. Snape won’t notice him, and he hasn’t got time to go anywhere else-- this will do.

He opens his book. _Anti-jinxes serve to prevent as opposed to remove adverse effects of offensive spells, and are therefore best categorised as Defensive Magic. This sets them apart from counter-jinxes, which…_

Peter’s just finishing skimming the section on counter-jinxes when footsteps on the opposite end of the courtyard make his eyes dart up, immediately setting him on edge again. But the newcomer doesn’t notice him either, and instead beelines straight for Snape. It’s Mulciber, tall and weedy in the hot sun, and from his vantage point behind the bushes Peter sees that he looks distinctly anxious. Snape doesn’t acknowledge him, and visibly startles when Mulciber says:

“There you are, finally. Have you been out here all morning?”

Snape mumbles something indistinct. Mulciber rolls his eyes. “Dunno why you bother, you could’ve gotten an O on the thing in first year. Something you need to see.” He flops something heavily onto the book still open in Snape lap— a newspaper. “Look.”

Peter can’t see Snape’s face as he picks up the paper and reads the headline, but he catches the line of his shoulders stiffening. “Hector…but he’d only—”

“Graduated last year? Yeah, and now he’s dead,” Mulciber says shortly. “It’s not just us— his friends, I mean— who’re upset, everybody’s in an uproar on the outside too. The Rosiers, they’re a big deal, an Auror killing one of their kids a year out of school— and the Ministry does nothing, doesn’t even slap Crouch’s wrist!”

“I don’t understand, how—?”

“That’s the thing,” Mulciber growls. “ _That’s_ what everybody’s so angry about. Go on, look.” He taps the paper with an impatient finger.

“‘Aurors granted new authority for usage of force’,” Snape reads. “They’ve…they’ve been allowed to kill?”

“And there wasn’t a whisper of it!” Mulciber exclaims, distraught. “The Ministry passed it through _without telling the public!_ Would you believe it?! And people actually want _Crouch_ for Minister of Magic! There’s a whole column in there on in, all this shite about ‘cracking down on Dark forces’— they’re prepared to do anything to stop progress, and this just bloody proves it!”

“It was only a matter of time,” Snape says lowly. “They haven’t been able to capture our people—”

Mulciber gives a satisfied sort of smirk. “The Dark Lord’s made sure of that.”

“—I expect they’re getting frustrated at the Ministry.”

At this Mulciber’s expression changes. He crosses his arms, nervous, before saying, “They aren’t the only ones.”

“What?”

He drops down onto the bench beside Snape, lowering his voice so that Peter (who doesn’t dare move, he doesn’t want to think what would happen if they noticed him now) can barely hear. “We got an owl from Evan this morning. His brother getting killed on a mission— he reckons it wouldn’t have happened if our ranks had covered him better, and from the sound of it the Dark Lord agrees. There’s a lot of talk about…about _loyalty_ , see?”

“Yeah, I expect—”

“You’ll wanna be careful, Sev.”

Snape turns sharply, taken aback. “What?”

“We’re all gonna want to be making our loyalties clear, now more than ever,” Mulciber says urgently. “Look, I’ve said this before—”

“And I’ve told you I’m sick of hearing it!”

“You and that Mudblood girl!” Mulciber hisses. “Sev, what’re you _thinking?_ ”

Even from the far side of the courtyard, Peter can see the colour rising in Snape’s face. “I don’t see what Lily’s got to do with what happened with Rosier.”

“You know what it looks like! Hanging round Mudbloods— that’s the sort of thing that makes people wonder which side you’re really on! How d’you think the Dark Lord would like it, if word got back to him that you were _soft_ on dirt like that?”

Snape goes even more viciously red. “Not— _soft_ — I…” He stammers incoherently for a moment before managing to spit, “I hate Mudbloods as much as any of you do, I’m every bit as dedicated! That you would think that I’m— that I’m less committed to the cause, just because—”

“Dunno what to think about it, nobody does,” Mulciber cuts in. He lowers his voice again. “Between you and me, there was some talk at breakfast. Everybody’s seen her sticking up for you to Potter. Some people were saying, won’t say who, but there was some talk about, ‘oh, well, Snape needs Mudbloods to fight his battles for him’—”

“Who was it?” he snarls, face twisting in anger. “I’ll…the nerve… ‘ _fight my battles’_ —!”

“It’s true!” Mulciber says. “I’m only telling you this ’cause you’re my mate: you’ve gotta be careful. Be real careful what people see between you and the Mudblood, because it _doesn’t_ look good, not at all.”

When Snape only glowers and sputters some more, Mulciber goes on, his tone wry. “’Sides, you’d have way less trouble with Potter, wouldn’t you?”

“What?”

Peter hears footsteps echoing in the corridor and voices, and he can’t believe it, it’s as if he were on cue: “If he makes us late for the stupid thing, I’ll kill him.”

James’ voice carries and the two on the other side of the bushes get to their feet, Snape noticeably startled while Mulciber just snorts. Both of their eyes fall on Peter at the same time and Snape looks torn between anger and alarm. “You!” he shouts across the courtyard. “How long have—” He cuts off, eyes narrowing. “And your friends call _me_ a sneak!”

Oh _shit_. “I—I’m n-n-not—”

Peter doesn’t have time to stammer out a full sentence before the approaching footsteps resolve themselves into James, Sirius, and Remus emerging into the courtyard behind him. He turns just in time to see James’ gaze slide over to Snape and to watch the lazy grin that crawls over his face. “Snivelly! What a delightful surprise.” He raises his wand, mouth opening on a hex, but cuts off, taken aback, when Mulciber gives another knowing snort.

Mulciber rolls his eyes to Snape. “He’s only sore,” he drawls, “because the Mudblood likes you better. He can’t _stand_ it.”

Peter whirls around, stomach falling to the vicinity of his toes, and finds James gone glaringly red even under his dark skin, his jaw hanging open. It’s a moment of mouthing wordlessly in outraged silence before he collects himself enough to give a loud, short laugh. “Yeah, right, cause you’re so clever, Mulciber! _Petrificus Totalus!_ ” But he’s so shaken that the spell misses by a mile, hitting a stone planter with a crack of white light, and Mulciber rolls his eyes, shoves his hands in his pockets, and saunters off.

Snape hasn’t moved. He’s staring at the spot where the spell hit but Peter suspects he isn’t seeing it; there’s a strange, tight expression on his face, like somebody trying to hold in a grin. Does he look…triumphant? Whatever it is, James sees it too, because he flushes even deeper red and points his wand again.

“What’re you smiling at?” he shouts. “I’ll— I ought to—!”

“Prongs,” comes a quiet voice. Peter turns around; he’d forgotten Remus was even there. He’s looking at his watch, a worried line forming between his eyebrows. “Can it wait?”

Sirius steps forward, taking James by the arm. “Later,” he says lowly. He flicks his eyes to Snape, sneering. “Watch your back, Snivellus.”

Seething, James knocks Sirius’ hand away, turns, and takes off down the corridor.

 

***

 

“The bollocks on that slippery little prat Mulciber,” James grumbles as they file in with the rest of the fifth years. “Dunno what’s so complicated about it. I hex Snivelly because he’s ugly and annoying and I hate him, that isn’t reason enough?”

“Right,” Remus says.

“As if _Evans_ of all people— _Evans!_ — had anything to do with it…well, he’s got some real bollocks, spouting shite like that, hasn’t he?”

“Sure has,” Remus says. He takes the first free desk he sees, letting James continue his tirade to Sirius as they wander closer to the front.

Remus thinks he does well on this one; he’s always had a particular knack for Defence. Or, at least, he does better in it than in Potions. Even so, he’s still rereading his answers when Professor Flitwick calls, “Quills down, please! That means you too, Stebbins!”

He and Peter join up with Sirius and James and join the flood of students exiting into the Entrance Hall. As they cross over the threshold, feeling the relief of one more exam done, Sirius gives Remus a playful knock to the shoulder. He’s been doing things like that more often lately.

The ghost of a smirk tugging at his mouth, Sirius says, “Did you like question ten, Moony?”

 

***

 

Time’s funny.

Remus will remember the incident years later, but not for the reasons you’d expect. The thing that’ll stick the memory to the walls of his mind for decades to come is that it was the first time James played with the Snitch, which is odd, because, as far as James habits go, that one will prove to be short-lived. The incident itself, earth-shaking in its consequence, will be an afterthought. When prompted, he’ll think: Oh, yeah. That was when that happened.

Time’s funny like that.

And Remus is the son of a literature teacher, he’s read as much Faulkner as the next werewolf. A touch more, even. He knows that the past isn’t dead, that it isn’t even past, and here and now, with the given value of _now_ — the chilly Entrance Hall of his teenage boarding school, under the laughing eyes of his crush, hanging in suspense, pre-punchline— Remus understands that concept in a distant, academic way. It’ll be many years before he truly knows, fully and bodily, the degree to which the past hangs around. Time recycles things: the same faces, the same words. Memories come back to life, gnawing, even when those who made them are dead.

The memory of the incident hangs around, golden as a Snitch in a summer heat wave. But Remus won’t realize until he’s asked about it (eons later, in a remote, unimaginable future) that, in his mind, it’s taken on the colour of a beginning. The start of something.

The start of what?

“Loved it,” Remus answers. “‘Give five signs that identify the werewolf.’ Excellent question.”

 

***

 

The Snitch glints golden in the sunlight, wings batting fruitlessly against James’ fingers.

Sirius raises his eyebrows. “Where’d you get that?”

“Nicked it.”

James leads the way down the grassy slope toward their favourite beech tree. He opens his hand and lets the Snitch fly, snatching it out of the air just at arm’s reach. His eyes flick sideways.

Remus looks around. His suspicions are confirmed: a group of eight or nine girls have accumulated on the near bank of the lake, chatting and laughing and kicking off shoes to cool their feet in the water. The clear fulcrum of the group is, of course, Lily Evans. She sits cross-legged at the water’s edge, plaiting Jeanette’s dark hair with deft fingers, laughing at something Vera’s said. Remus turns his head in time to see James swallow, rake a hand through his already-messy hair, and release the Snitch again.

They hide from the heat in the shade of their tree and spread out in the grass. Remus sits against a crook in the roots, pulls out _Intermediate Transfiguration_ , and opens to one of his many bookmarks. He squints down at the page. A headache’s coming. Why can’t he remember anything about Cross-Species Switches? This heat is making his brain sluggish. He pours over the chapter, ignoring the appreciative gasps and claps coming from Peter; James must still be at it with the stupid Snitch.

When Peter gives an actual cheer, Sirius’ voice cuts in. He’s sitting closer than Remus realised.

“Put that away, will you? Before Wormtail wets himself.”

“If it bothers you.”

“I’m bored,” Sirius announces. “Wish it was full moon.”

Ignoring the small, guilty part of himself that almost agrees, Remus says, “You might. We’ve still got Transfiguration, if you’re bored you could test me…Here.”

He holds his book out. Remus doesn’t mean to glance, but he does: Sirius sprawls next to him in the leafy shade, elegantly bored as a park-goer in a Manet painting, and it’s with sudden, arresting clarity that Remus remembers he never did the reading on Cross-Species Switches because he’d been otherwise occupied, holed up somewhere with Sirius. He swallows.

“I don’t need to look at that rubbish,” Sirius says. “I know it all.”

James’ quiet voice makes Remus, distinctly out of it, come back to earth: “This’ll liven you up, Padfoot. Look who it is…”

“Excellent,” Sirius exhales, quiet. “ _Snivellus_.”

Remus drops his eyes to his book, willing himself to read, to drown out the sound of Sirius and James getting to their feet.

“All right, Snivellus?”

Remus should’ve expected this, after the little incident in the courtyard earlier. He should’ve realised that at the first opportunity James would strike out for revenge, fix the damage to his bruised ego. Everybody they know is around. The audience is too good for them to pass up, a uniquely perfect occasion to humiliate…Remus fixes his gaze firmly on the page, trying not to hear…

“ _Expelliarmus!_ ”

A soft thud, Sirius’ short, sharp laugh. “ _Impedimenta!_ ”

Footsteps through the grass. On Remus’ other side, Peter gets to his feet.

From farther away now: “How’d the exam go, Snivelly?”

“I was watching him, his nose was touching the parchment. There’ll be great grease marks all over it, they won’t be able to read a word.” Remus can’t hear Snape’s response, but Sirius’ voice continues loud and clear: “Wait for what? What’re you going to do, Snivelly, wipe your nose on us?”

Another garbled reply, and James this time: “Wash out your mouth. _Scourgify!_ ”

The choking, gagging sounds are almost disguised by distant, surrounding laughter. James and Sirius got their audience, then. But, now, a different voice:

“Leave him ALONE!”

Remus reads. _Transforming Spells must be adapted when performing Cross-Species Switches, depending on variables in bodyweight and/or density owing to the feather/fur/scale pattern of intended—_

“All right, Evans?”

“Leave him alone. What’s he done to you?”

“Well…it’s more the fact that he _exists_ , if you know what I mean…”

More laughter.

“You think you’re funny. But you’re just an arrogant, bullying toerag, Potter. Leave him _alone_.”

The words sound tumbled out of James by accident: “I will if you go out with me, Evans. Go on.”

It’s the pure shock of it that pulls Remus out of his book at last.

From the looks of it, he isn’t alone: a ways off he spots Dirk and Casey with their mouths open in horrified, silent laughter; Marco Whitby looks murderous at the front of a group of bystanders; the girls at the lake’s edge have gone silent; Sirius’ eyebrows skyrocket for his hairline.

James himself has taken on the stubborn, slightly bewildered expression of a man stunned by his own daring. He squares his shoulders. “Go out with me,” James says, “and I’ll never lay a wand on old Snivelly again.”

Lily gives him a look that would freeze water in a heat wave.

“I wouldn’t go out with you if it was a choice between you and the giant squid.”

“Bad luck, Prongs,” says Sirius. He turns. “OY!”

Remus finally notices Snape, crawling on the ground against the fading Impediment Jinx, hand closing around his fallen wand.

It happens so fast Remus can’t make sense of it: there’s a flash of light and a splash of red, a whirl of robes, a second flash, cheering and roaring laughter— and Snape hangs suspended by the ankle.

Remus looks back down at his book again.

“Let him down!”

“Certainly.” _Thump._

“ _Petrificus Totalus!_ ” A second thud of body-meets-ground.

“LEAVE HIM ALONE!”

“Ah, Evans, don’t make me hex you.”

“Take the curse off him, then!”

A sigh, a mumbled countercurse. “There you go. You’re lucky Evans was here, Snivellus—”

“I don’t need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!”

Remus’ stomach drops out. He looks up.

The shocked silence that’s fallen over the onlookers is unbearable. Peter’s jaw has fallen open; Remus can’t parse the look on Sirius’ face.

Lily blinks.

“Fine,” she says. Her voice is even. “I won’t bother in future. And I’d wash your pants if I were you, _Snivellus_.”

James is beside himself with fury. “Apologise to Evans!”

“I don’t want _you_ to make him apologise!” She rounds on James, bites out: “You’re as bad as he is…”

“What?” James’ voice cracks, and Remus watches his face fall in horror. “I’d NEVER call you a— you-know-what!”

“Messing up your hair because you think it looks cool to look like you’ve just got off your broomstick,” Lily shoots back, jaw working, and Remus has a horrible feeling that she’s fighting back tears, “showing off with that stupid Snitch, walking down corridors and hexing anyone who annoys you just because you can— I’m surprised your broomstick can get off the ground with that fat head on it. You make me SICK.”

She turns, hair glinting bloodily in the too-bright sunshine, and runs.

“Evans!” James shouts, strained and desperate. “Hey, EVANS!” His voice cracks.

Jeanette and Marianne hurry up the bank, shoes crunching. Lily dodges them. With nowhere else to look, everybody watches her run up to the front doors and out of view. Remus feels very sick.

No one wants to be the first to say something, except, of course, for James.

“What is it with her?” He gives the most self-consciously casual shrug Remus has ever seen.

“Reading between the lines,” Sirius says, “I’d say she thinks you’re a bit conceited, mate.”

James nods. His mouth is a hard line, his face is flushed; he can’t meet anybody’s eyes. “Right,” he grits out. “Right—”

A flash of light later, Snape is hanging from his ankle again. “Who wants to see me take off Snivelly’s pants?” James calls.

But nobody laughs this time. The crowd of onlookers is dissolving. Marco looks at James like he’s never seen him before, Dirk takes him and Casey by the elbows and tugs them away; Jeanette and Marianne turn heel and run up to the castle; Ned Dawlish shakes his head, muttering. The remaining girls at the water’s edge stand up en masse and drift, heads bent together, towards the far side of the bank.

James stands next to Snape, still hanging by the ankle, as their side of the lakeshore gradually empties. Something frantic and lost has settled over James’ face. He turns, hands clenching uselessly, toward Sirius.

Sirius waves his wand, and Snape topples to the ground in a crumpled heap. He aims a kick at his side. “Get lost,” he grunts. “Before we think of something better.”

But Snape doesn’t move. He stays collapsed on the grass, eyes fixed unblinkingly at the ground. He’s gone very white.

“Are you deaf _and_ ugly?” James roars. “Beat it!”

Snape doesn’t move.

Sirius shrugs. “Have it your way, then. _Petrificus Totalus!_ ” He and James laugh when Snape goes rigid as a board again, but it sounds strained to Remus. “Can stay there all night, Snivelly.” 

“I’m starving,” announces James. He waves to Peter and Remus. “C’mon, you lot.”

Remus jumps to his feet. He wants nothing more than to be gone from this spot. But just as they’re gathering their things and making to leave, Sirius pauses.

“Hang on,” he says.

Sirius crosses back to Snape’s immobilised form, stops, crouches down. He leans in, and speaks so softly Remus can’t be entirely certain he’s heard correctly:

“She’s worth a hundred of any of you.”

He straightens up again, smoothes his robes, and spits squarely onto Snape’s face. Then he turns on his heel and goes loping up toward the castle.

The four of them walk in silence all the way up to the front doors.

Again, James is the first to speak. “You should’ve killed him when you had the chance, Moony,” he says.

 

***

 

Lily Evans is nowhere to be seen at lunch.

“Y’know what?” James says. “At least she knows now. Shown his true colours, hasn’t he? Good. In the long run, for her, I mean.”

Remus puts down his fork, harder than necessary. “I’m glad you’re pleased with yourself, James.”

James’ face falls and his mouth opens, but Remus stands before he can speak. He walks the length of the table, taking a seat at the far end closest to the entrance. There’s nobody sitting down here except for a clump of little first years who eye him nervously. Remus pulls a plate toward himself but can’t muster up the motivation to actually put food on it. He knows he should eat something— they’ve got the Defence practical this afternoon— but he’s already so full of sickly, squirming guilt that he doesn’t think there’s room inside himself for anything else.

How many times has he sat through James and Sirius torturing Snape? Kept quiet when James fired off a hex at somebody he’d never spoken to because he wanted to ‘try it out’, stood aside when Sirius was needlessly cruel? Remus wishes today could’ve been the day he got some guts, put a stop to it. Maybe he could’ve saved Lily the misery.

He wonders what changed. Out of all those times those two baited Snape, why was today the day that he spit out that ugly, unforgivable word at a girl he seemed so close to? Why today?

“She’s not in the Tower.”

Marianne’s voice directly behind Remus startles him; out of his peripheral vision he sees her joining Jeanette at the entrance to the Great Hall.

“Told you,” Jeanette says. “I came in right after her and didn’t see her going up the stairs. She couldn’t’ve gone up them in that time, I would’ve spotted her.”

“How’d she disappear so fast? Where’d she go?”

“Search me,” Jeanette says sadly. They head to join their friends at the table.

Remus has a hunch. He wraps some food in a napkin and leaves for the Entrance Hall.

The broom cupboard door swings open with a creak and there she is, curled up on the floor in a dusty corner, squashed against a rusty old cauldron. Lily’s face is splotchy and tear-streaked but not surprised when she says, “How’d you know?”

He shrugs. “Sirius and I used to snog in here.”

“Oh,” she says. She sniffs, drags her sleeve across her face. Remus closes the door, sits down, and in the darkness produces a jam jar from his pocket. He murmurs the incantation and the tiny cupboard fills with flickering blue light.

Lily sniffles again. “’S nice.”

“Thanks.” He hands over the napkin bundle. “You’ve got an exam in an hour, you should eat something.”

Nodding, she takes the napkin. Without warning, her face crumples and she dissolves into tears. “You’re so decent, Remus,” she says thickly.

Uncomfortable, he picks a loose thread on his sleeve. “If I were decent I’d have said something. Just once in the past five years, I might’ve said something.”

“Don’t,” she chokes as her mouth trembles against a fresh wave of tears. “He— he deserved it. I don’t care, Potter can say what he likes.”

He doesn’t know what to say, so he stays quiet. Lily opens the napkin, pulls out a roll, and tears it apart with her fingers. Hiccoughing slightly, she says, “You know the worst part of it? I—I’d—” she swallows, “I’d given Sirius a lecture on friendship a couple of months ago. I told him off for only wanting to be my friend when it was convenient for him, w-when Potter wasn’t around, or—or when he was sad about you—”

Something in Remus’ chest squeezes.

“—and I told him, ‘Severus doesn’t act like that, his mates don’t like me either but he doesn’t care because h-he’s—he’s my friend.’ My oldest friend.” The roll drops into her lap as a sob shakes her, quickly muffled into her hand. “I feel so stupid,” she gasps. “I’m so— so humiliated, I feel so _stupid_ …”

“You haven’t done anything wrong, you haven’t got to feel stupid,” Remus says firmly. He remembers the night they talked by the dying common room fire, how she’d pulled his secret shame out of him and known just what to say even though they aren’t even properly _friends_ and he wishes that he had that skill too, for knowing just which words would make the horrible sadness just a bit lighter. But he doesn’t, and all he can do is repeat her own words back at her: “We don’t get to choose what hurts us.”

She nods.

Eventually she manages a few mouthfuls of the roll. Remus sits there quietly, watching the blue light flicker over the brooms and cobwebs. He wonders if he shouldn’t go and fetch Jeanette; Lily needs a close friend right now, not the bloke she trades corridor patrols with. But minutes pass, and still he can’t make himself leave.

“None of my friends understand why I even talk to him,” she mumbles. “I always made excuses, I couldn’t look Mary in the face for a month. I haven’t had a real conversation with my sister in years…even Sirius, he…” She shakes her head, wipes her red face on her sleeve, takes an unsteady breath. Seems to collect herself. “I’ve got to toughen up. Good riddance, right? He’s chosen his way. What’ve I lost, really?”

Remus doesn’t know how to tell her that he hopes she never toughens up, since the world is lacking in people who are so profoundly gentle as Lily is, still manages to be even with her Gryffindor nerve, her Gryffindor cheek. Privately, he thinks it’d be a tremendous loss. It isn’t his place to say, though, so he doesn’t.

 

***

 

The score is one thousand one hundred and thirty to nine hundred and ninety-one.

“We’re falling behind.” James picks at the faint pink gash across his cheek. It’d healed up with dittany in a second, but the stupid sod won’t stop poking at it. “I swear we’ve played once this whole month.”

“We’ve had exams,” Sirius points out. He puts down a card without looking at it.

“Still do.”

“Wormtail, how much more can you revise?” James snaps, still scratching at the cut. “It’s just Transfiguration.”

“I’m pants at Transfiguration.”

“You’re an _Animagus_.”

“Still.”

“If you keep picking at that thing I’ll hex your fingers off,” Sirius says.

James lobs a sparking card at Sirius’ head. “At least I go to the hospital wing without being _forcibly dragged there_ , and I’m not even a haemophiliac.”

Sirius huffs irritably. “Still wanna know what hex that even was. Did you hear the incantation?”

“Who knows, the bastard’s been up to his ears in the Dark Arts since first year. Your go, Moony.”

“I think you’re right,” Remus says to Peter. “It’s really late, we’ve still got a day of exams left— hell, Prongs and Wormtail have got two—”

“It _is_ late,” James pipes up, with that look on his face that says he’s received inspiration from on high, “there’ll be nobody down there to tattle on us— perfect opportunity for a bit of an outing!”

“That’s not at all what I was implying.”

“Sure it was. Let’s go check out that statue!”

“Statue?”

“The one at the gates! The one with the—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Sirius interrupts. “There isn’t a bloody secret passageway under the school gates, that’d make no sense.”

He only sort of believes that; mostly he’s concerned about what would happen if they _did_ find a passageway and it happened to be the one he and Remus discovered ages ago and kept secret. Faking surprise would be easy, sure. But Sirius really doesn’t feel like dealing with it.

“How d’you know until you look?” James wheedles. “C’mon, since when do you pass up a nighttime stroll? Are you a Gryffindor or not?”

Sirius sighs. He hates when James plays that card, but mostly he hates how it always works.

James collects the Invisibility Cloak from under his bed and leads the way down the stairs, where he pokes his head out and investigates. “Coast is clear,” he reports. He opens the door and they tumble out into the common room, and James begins his speech.

“Alright lads, we’ll—”

He’s interrupted by the sound of the portrait hole swinging open. Sirius turns around and sees none other than Lily Evans clambering into the room. She’s wearing a pale yellow dressing gown and a stony expression as she crosses toward the stairs, paying them as much attention as she would four pieces of furniture.

At his side, James gives a noticeable jolt. His hand flies to his hair. “All right, Evans? Not breaking curfew?”

She blinks, looking as though she only just noticed he was there. Then, without even her usual scathing look, she continues to the girls’ stairway and disappears.

“Wonder what that was about,” James says, and the plonker’s still trying to sound oh-so _casual_. “What’s she doing out after-hours?”

“Who knows,” says Remus. Sirius nods noncommittally and keeps walking, but James stays put.

“I mean, you lot aren’t on patrol tonight. So, I don’t know how a goody two-shoes like her can be—”

Sirius explodes.

“Oh, for FUCK’S sake!” he shouts, loud enough to wake the whole of Gryffindor Tower. He’s past caring. “Would you please, for the love of Merlin and all that is good and holy, stop acting as though you aren’t obsessed with _Lily-bloody-goddamn-Evans!_ ”

Even by the dying light of the fire, James’ face is colouring. “I am not _obsessed_ with—!”

“Fucking hell, we were THERE!” Sirius roars. “We were THERE, James! The whole school saw you try to ask out Evans with the _stupidest_ tactics ever attempted in human history, so can we please stop with this whole stupid charade that’s been going on for  _five bloody years,_ and just— just admit you fancy the girl so we can all of us _move on with our lives?”_

Silence hangs while Sirius pants for breath. He feels loads better, but also a bit afraid of the look on James’ face, because it’s one he’s never seen before. Peter stands off to the side looking stricken; Remus studies the carpet. The last embers crackle in the fire.

“I might fancy her a bit, yeah,” James says softly.

That…was easier than Sirius anticipated. He nods. “Right. Thank you. Can we go now?”

They’ve shuffled, Cloaked and cramped and invisible, all the way down to the first floor before anyone speaks. “Prongs?” Remus whispers. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to ask.”

“Have you, though?” James mumbles.

“This afternoon, when you…asked,” he says gingerly. “Did…did you really think that’d _work?_ ”

“I think it’s safe to ditch this thing for now, yeah?” James says a bit loudly, tugging off the Invisibility Cloak and wadding it under his arm. “Doesn’t cover all four of us anymore anyway. Filch was up in the trophy room, we’ll be fine.”

Remus, suddenly anxious, narrowly avoids backing into a suit of armour in the dimness. “What about Peeves?”

“We’ll protect you, don’t worry.” Sirius rolls his eyes. “You wouldn’t expect a poltergeist to hold a grudge for so long, would you?”

“It’s only been five years since the incident,” Remus says darkly. “That’s hardly five minutes to a dead person. Who knows how long he’ll hate me?”

Maybe it’s the subject of Peeves that makes Remus the first to jump at the hint of movement on the other side of the corridor. When Sirius follows his gaze, though, it’s very much a living person he sees emerging from behind the tapestry:

“ _Snivellus?_ ”

Nobody hears him: James has gotten out his wand. “ _Stupefy!”_

Snape gets over his shock at the sight of them quickly. He dodges the hex, sending it ricocheting against the frame of a painting, the occupant of which wakes with a start and screams. He pulls out his own wand and slashes it blindly through the air; James flings himself sideways and just misses the jet of red light that hits a suit of armour with a resounding _CLANG_. Staggered halfway to the stone floor James swings his own wand and cries, “IMPEDIMENTA!” Snape blocks it with a snarl, the now-awake portraits lining the walls gasp and shout, Snape raises his wand again—

“ _Protego!_ ”

The curse, whatever it is, smacks against the transparent barrier with a sinister sizzling noise. Sirius whirls around and sees Remus, his wand outstretched between James and Snape, both panting, glaring through the Shield Charm at the other with purest loathing.

“Take it down, Moony,” James growls.

“You’ll wake the whole castle,” Remus pleads, staring imploringly at James. “Just…please…”

A long moment passes in near silence, James and Snape shooting daggers at each other with their eyes while Remus’ shield crackles translucently between them. Finally James gives a curt nod. Slowly as if against his will, Remus lowers his arm. The shield vanishes; James and Snape pace closer, wands raised.

“And just what are you up to, skulking around at this hour?” James says lowly. “Meeting your slippery little pals for a Death Eater slumber party? Though, wouldn’t have to leave your own dormitory for that, would you?”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, Potter,” Snape grits out. “Telling _me_ off, when everybody knows how you lot sneak out at night, doing…whatever it is you’re doing, out— out—” He’s so angry he’s visibly struggling for words, finally settling on, “ _marauding_ on the grounds—”

Sirius laughs loudly. “ _Marauding?_ That’s adorable, I do like that.” He isn’t going to let James have all the fun, he raises his wand: “ _Petrificus totalus!_ ”

But Snape is prepared; he blocks it effortlessly. He turns to Sirius next. “You heard your half-breed, Black-- keep your voice down. Or are you too stupid to cast nonverbally?”

Sirius opens his mouth to answer, but James cuts over him:

“Go on, tell us what you’re doing out of bed, Snivelly, and we won’t curse you into a sea slug.”

Even in the darkness of the deserted corridor Sirius can see Snape’s blotchy flush, sees his mouth spasming against rage or hatred or something else. And then he remembers that the hidden stairwell Snape’s just emerged from opens at the fourth floor, and realises it’s a good question that James has posited: what reason would Snape have for wandering around at night, so many floors above the Slytherin dungeons?

It’s when he remembers something else— Lily Evans, grave-faced and distracted, climbing through the portrait hole after curfew in her dressing gown— that Sirius puts it together.

“You were trying to make nice with Evans,” he spits, “weren’t you, you pathetic piece of filth? What, were you lurking round Gryffindor Tower, trying to get her to pity you, saying no, you hadn’t _really_ meant to call her M—”

“SHUT UP!” Snape roars. He’s panting again, wand trained on Sirius and eyes manic in his reddened face. “Don’t— don’t you _dare—!_ ”

“What’re you gonna do, call me a nasty name?” Sirius drawls. “Good luck shocking me, grease stain, I’ve heard ’em all.”

“There’s nothing stopping me anymore,” Snape says. He’s muttering to himself. His black eyes have gone unfocused.“Now that, now that she…what’s keeping me here? Nothing now. They’ve said all along, when the Dark Lord rises, this place— this place…won’t be needing _Charms_ class…what’s keeping me here?” His gaze sharpens again, but this time it’s Remus he stares at. “So what if they expel me now? What’s preventing me from going and telling _everybody_ about your furry little friend?”

Sirius watches Remus go pale with terror and, suddenly, it all becomes very easy.

He steps forward. “Because I’ll kill you first,” he says.

Snape’s eyes bulge in his face. “Sure you will.”

“Ask me if I’m bluffing,” Sirius says.

He’s not.

“You haven’t got the guts,” Snape says.

Stepping even closer, Sirius raises his wand until it’s fixed directly between Snape’s eyes. It’s a delightful sight, the cowardly little shit going cross-eyed. “Haven’t I?” Sirius says softly.

His face goes from red to white. “You’re— you’re mad, Black. You’re mad as all the rest of them, you’re— you’re raving—”

“Well, you’ve got that part right,” Sirius says casually. He feels exceptionally calm. “Madness runs in the family, you said it yourself…So, you've got to wonder…” Sirius leans in closer, towering over him until he can hear his rapid breathing. “ _Am I bluffing?_ ”

A long, heavy moment passes. Sirius feels glacially calm. The little colour that was left in Snape's face leaks out.

Finally, skinny shoulders heaving with his breaths, Snape staggers backwards. His eyes huge and wild, Snape lifts his wand to shoulder height, wielding it like a sword.

“Alright,” he breathes. “Have it your way.” Then his knuckles are tightening around the wand in his fist and he says, “Let’s see how pure that blood is. _SECTUMSEMPRA!”_

Sirius sees the wand slash heavily through the air, feels the searing pain across his torso that follows its path, slicing him from shoulder to hip. He hears the hoarse shout from his own throat and watches Snape balk in horror and flee. He feels himself hit the cold stone floor, but still Sirius can’t fully understand what’s happened.

Then he smells the blood, and everything goes white.

 

***

 


	5. shake some action

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Everybody thought it was this great hymn to the youth when it came out, but nope. It’s just about…y’know. How doomed they are.”
> 
> “I don’t see why they’re mutually exclusive."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: blood. It's symbolic, but it's also kind of gross.

 

***

 

Peter must’ve been about five or six at the time of the memory. Seven? Eight, maybe. The circumstances haven’t stuck in his mind the way the image of it has.

He was playing with his cousins on a playground in their village, a broken-down one with old equipment, swings that creaked and groaned, a slide so rusted through it’d come away in flakes under your fingernails. It’s that slide he remembers, because it’d sliced open his cousin’s back. A still frame in his memory, like a photograph: it’d taken most of Clive’s shirt along with the skin on his back. The scrap of fabric stuck like an afterthought to the once-beige metal, streaked with so, so much blood it didn’t look real, dizzyingly out of context on a summer day. Cinema amounts of blood, thick and red and shiny like spilled paint. Peter’s never forgotten it.

There was more blood than that, this time.

“Miracle you were on this floor,” repeats Madam Pomfrey. “Nothing short of a miracle.”

Seated at Peter’s side, Remus is looking anywhere but at Madam Pomfrey as she leans over the bed to trace her wand, yet again, over Sirius’ chest. “Miraculous,” he says quietly. There’s a dark spatter visible over his collar, crusting in his hair.

She nods to James, who’s hovering at her side. “Again, then, Potter— hold him still…”

Peter drops his eyes. Three times he’s watched James help Madam Pomfrey force-feed potion to Sirius, grey-white and unconscious. Three times is enough.

The blood coating Peter’s hands has changed colour, he sees, creasing darkly in the lines of his palms. His skin looks rusted over, his fingernails outlined in crusty brown. His sleeves stick to the skin of his forearms. His robes crunch strangely as he sits, the black folds gone stiff. He stinks like blood.

“That’s enough for now,” Madam Pomfrey says. “Get to bed, you all.”

“No.”

Peter looks up, surprised. There’s a hard look on Remus’ face to match the tone of his voice.

Madam Pomfrey is so taken aback she’s hardly scolding: “You’re out after curfew the night before exams. Get to Gryffindor Tower, the lot of you, and be grateful that I—”

“We’re not leaving.”

“ _Lupin_ ,” she says, “this is not a _debate!_ ”

“I’ll sleep here,” Remus says. “It’s up to you lot, but—”

“We are too,” James pipes up. “We’re not leaving.”

Maybe it’s the late hour, or the friend lying near-dead in front of them, or the soft spot she’s always held for Remus, but Madam Pomfrey relents. She shakes her head, sighs, “I must be out of my mind,” and goes to fetch them pyjamas.

Later Peter lies in his borrowed bed, wondering how he’s supposed to fall asleep. They washed their hands in a pristine porcelain basin, put on fresh, un-bloodstained clothes, but he can’t stop smelling it. The stench of Sirius’ blood is stubborn in his nose, smelling somehow both like a jarful of oxidized coins and rotting-sweet like roadkill; like nothing that should come out of a human body but unmistakably organic in an unwholesome way that churns Peter's stomach. He swears he can _taste_ it, as if he’s washed his mouth out with salt and rusty nails. He chokes back the heaved-up sourness that rises in his throat.

He can’t stop remembering it. Reliving it, over and over.

A theatrical spatter of red in the darkness, and Sirius collapsed, James sprinted off after Snape and screamed obscenities and Remus dropped to the floor and Peter just _stood_ there, unable to do anything, to think, to move, to make sense of what'd happened, and for an endless moment he just _watched_ — Remus fumbling at the wetness spreading over Sirius’ robes as red pulsed thick over his hands and pooled, bigger and bigger, on the stone floor, Peter’s nose was full of metal and his ears were full of senseless ringing but still he saw as something steely washed over Remus’ expression, Remus, who was craning his neck in the direction of James’ retreating back and screaming, “JAMES!”

“YOU COWARD!” James roared from somewhere in the darkness. “Stay and FIGHT!”

“Leave it, James!”

“I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him, I’LL K—”

“And Sirius’ll be dead!” Remus snarled. His sleeves had ridden up and his arms were red to the elbow; Sirius’ eyelids were flickering, breaths rattling from his slack mouth. “ _Leave it!_ ”

It worked. James wheeled around and then they were hauling Sirius up by the limbs— Peter with one arm, Remus the other, James holding him around the knees— and then the first floor corridor had never been so long, it stretched black and endless in front of them while they moved like some strange many-legged creature. Peter's first, stupid thought in the moment was _oh,_ _blood is hot_ — how could it be, when Sirius himself was so cold? The skin of his forearm was clammy like they’d fished him out of icy water and Peter’s fingers were scrabbling to keep hold, his hands slick with the heat that was trickling down his arms and leaving a spattered trail of drops behind them, making them slip and stagger, smearing under their shoes.

James was shouting something but Peter couldn’t hear what— the blood kept coming, running thick over their hands without slowing down— but of course it wouldn’t slow down, this blood was _Sirius’_ , Sirius’ famous ancient blood that rushes out of him at every opportunity as if it were proud of itself, as if it had a mind of its own, would gladly kill its host if it got the chance—

In the dark, Peter chokes on air. Is he going to cry? Be sick? He isn't sure. 

There are faint voices coming from Madam Pomfrey’s office. Peter can’t hear what they’re saying but they're familiar: McGonagall, Slughorn. Then a fourth, softer, barely discernible. Dumbledore? He lies there for a bit and listens. He remembers that he ought to be worried about having energy for exams tomorrow-- it's Transfiguration, his worst subject-- but somehow the terror of O.W.L.s seems unreal, as if it were a problem somebody else were having.

When Peter finally manages sleep, his dreams are strange and restless.

He dreams that he’s in that broken-down playground of his childhood and it’s somehow also the Shrieking Shack, and he’s done something horrible but can’t remember what. Regulus Black is climbing the ladder to the rusty slide. Regulus slides down, leaving a thick bloody trail behind him. When he stands up he turns into Sirius, who is soaked with red. Dream-Sirius doesn’t appear to notice that he’s drenched in blood. He looks at Peter and smiles.

“I can trust you, right?” asks Dream-Sirius, and Peter blinks awake in a cold sweat.

It’s nearly sunrise, the flush on the horizon just visible through the tall windows. Something moves in the corner of Peter’s eye. Disoriented, he looks over without sitting up.

Across the aisle, Remus has a chair drawn up so close to Sirius’ bedside that his knees press against the mattress. He reaches out and takes Sirius’ hand from where it lies limply on the sheets. He holds it for a moment, brings it to his lips, lowers it again. Face lost in bluish shadow, Remus clings to Sirius’ hand with both of his.

Peter squeezes his eyes shut. He wasn’t supposed to have seen. He wishes he hadn’t.

He drifts off again.

***

When Remus wakes from fitful dozing sometime around dawn, he finds himself moving to Sirius’ side without the conscious decision to do so. He crosses the dark, silent hospital wing and pulls up a chair.

The sight of him wracks Remus with a sick lurch of horror. If he didn’t know that Sirius was alive— if he hadn’t made Madam Pomfrey _swear_ that yes, there’s no doubt in her mind, they’d gotten him here just in time— he’d suppose he was looking at a corpse. Sirius, fair-skinned to begin with, is grey-white as river rock. His face has a sick, clammy sheen, and the skin around his closed eyelids looks puffy, purplish, bruise-like. His lips are blue. Remus swallows. _He’s alive_ , he says to himself. _He’s alive, Madam Pomfrey swore he’d make it through the night…_

He can’t help himself: he reaches for one deathly-grey, blue-fingernailed hand. It’s warm.

Something shakes inside Remus and almost falls out of his throat on a broken sound, but he chokes it back. He knows he’s trembling when he brings Sirius’ hand to his face and presses it to his lips, feeling its warmth against the sensitive skin. He holds it with both hands on top of the mattress and wills the nausea away. They were in time, they made it just in time…

But that thought only chills him more. It was a very near thing. Madam Pomfrey said that Sirius' system had gone into shock, that he missed organ failure by a handful of minutes. If there’d been a locked door, a flight of stairs separating them from the hospital wing…Remus’ stomach lurches again. For a long stretch of moments, he doesn’t know how long, Remus sits there and watches for every sign of life: his chest rising and falling, a strand of hair blown by his breath. Gingerly, Remus places two fingers on the fragile dip between Sirius’ jaw and throat to feel the soft beat of blood there. Streaks of orange are seeping up from the horizon when he lifts Sirius’ hand to his mouth again, setting lips to knuckles. Warm skin. Relief.

“’S not a bad way to wake up.”

He nearly jumps out of his skin. Sirius’ smile is blue-lipped and tired, but it’s warm. Remus drops his hand as if it’s burnt him, but too late. Caught.

“How’re you feeling?” Remus asks.

Sirius watches him with sleep-heavy eyes, and the shaky smile goes wider. “Better now,” he rasps.

Face burning, Remus jumps to his feet. He runs across the aisle to James’ bed, picks up a pillow, and throws it at his sleeping form. James makes a confused, groggy sound to which Remus says, “He’s up!”

James leaps out of bed with a yelp, bounds over, and hurls himself onto Sirius’ bed. He lands more heavily on top of him than most people would, given Sirius’ condition.

Sirius rolls his eyes and swats at him. “Chill out, mum.”

Reckoning he ought to give them a moment, Remus goes to wake up Peter. Sure enough, when he turns back again James is squashed up against Sirius’ side on the narrow hospital bed, wiping surreptitiously under his glasses with the heels of his hands. Remus and Peter pull up chairs while James helps Sirius sit up, piling pillows behind him for support.

“Thanks,” Sirius says, still hoarse. “I still feel sort of…weak, I guess?”

“You mean like you lost twenty percent of your blood, like that? That how you feel?”

He gives James another feeble smack. “Sod off.”

“You look…” Peter begins. He cuts off, looking rather weak himself.

Sirius raises an eyebrow, an effort toward the old smirk. “What, have I got to have all my blood to be devilishly handsome? Reckon I’m losing my touch.”

“You look like death, mate.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No, really,” James insists. “You look like you died three weeks ago and we went and dug you up and reanimated you with Dark magic. You look like an Inferius that stood in the cold too long. You look like the Bloody Baron with a bad bout of flu. You—”

“I’ve got it.”

“No, hang on, I’m on a roll. You look like a frost-bitten ghoul. You look like the human incarnation of the colour grey. You look like you had unprotected sex with the grim reaper.”

“Alright, alright, I get it.”

None of them say anything for a long time. The hospital wing is quiet as the sky outside hints at blue, the recent heat already creeping in through the windows and threatening another scorching summer’s day. A few early-rising birds are singing somewhere far away on the grounds. The four of them sit silently, listening to the dawn.

Sirius is the first to speak. “What happened to Snape?”

“Dunno,” James says with a scowl. “Expect we woke up McGonagall; we went right past her office shouting our heads off. Somebody’s tracked him down by now.”

“‘Tracked him down’? He _got_ _away?_ ”

“You were gushing blood, Black,” James says, a bit sharply. Remus remembers how he tried to chase Snape, how much it clearly pained him to let him escape. It strikes Remus just how few situations there are in which James could force himself to not fight back. “Dunno if you remember, but anything with you and blood makes us a bit nervous.”

Sirius makes a noncommittal _mmph_ sound. “It’d have been bad on anybody, it’s not just because of my…thing.”

James doesn’t appear to be listening. “Merlin, out of all fucking curses to pick, the evil little creep had to pick that one! Didn’t even _know_ , on you of all people—”

“Give him some credit,” Remus snaps, astounded. He’s so stunned by James’ obliviousness that he doesn’t stop to consider how disastrous it could be, pointing this out. “Prongs, you don’t really imagine that curse was a coincidence?”

When James opens his mouth no words come out, so Remus goes on. “It’s no a secret that Sirius is a haemophiliac, or that he hates having something in common with the Blacks. Snape picked that spell because Sirius has got the family disease, for the insult _and_ the injury of it.”

James gapes. Sirius glares down at the bedspread, furious embarrassment so clear in his expression that Remus is sure he’d be red in the face if his veins could manage it.

Peter voices Remus’ next thought: “D’you think he invented it?”

“Especially for Sirius? It’s possible,” Remus answers. “Madam Pomfrey said she didn’t recognise the curse, hadn’t seen it before…I don’t know. It’s possible.”

There’s a creak of bedsprings; James has gotten to his feet. “I’ll fucking end him,” he growls, pacing out into the aisle. “He’s not gonna get away with—”

“Don’t you get it?!” Remus bursts out. He stands up. “This is what happens!” He flings a hand toward Sirius. “This never-ending chain you three have got— it’s going to keep happening, keep getting worse until somebody actually dies! You attack him, he attacks you— You can’t…you can’t keep feeding it!”

James whirls around. “What’re you saying? That he _deserved_ it?”

“No!”

“Then what are you saying, Remus? Because it sounds like you’re saying Snivellus was _justified_ in trying to kill him!”

“I’m not, I’m not!” he cries. “I’m…I’m just saying—”

“ _What?_ ”

“It’s got to stop somewhere,” Remus says, weak. He can already feel his courage leaving him, whatever fleeting bout of backbone he grew suddenly to tell James off like he never has before.

Remus wonders where it’ll end, this feud. Nothing seems to be big enough, horrible enough, to satisfy it. It wasn’t enough when Sirius attacked Snape for spying on them in the Forbidden Forest, it wasn’t enough when Remus’ real feelings for Sirius were revealed through an ill-devised love potion revenge scheme, and it wasn’t enough when Sirius’ little brother somehow became involved.

It wasn’t enough when Snape tried to dig up dirt on James and ended up discovering Remus’ secret because it wasn’t enough for him to catch Remus being smuggled out of the Entrance Hall by Madam Pomfrey, Sirius had to tell him the secret himself, and it _still_ wasn’t enough when Snape was nearly killed and Sirius was nearly expelled and Remus had his heart broken by _himself_ or when he nearly died two months in a row and Sirius nearly died trying to make everything better and James got his ego bruised and Lily sobbed in a broom cupboard and Sirius lay bloodless in a hospital bed. None of it was bad enough to make anyone see sense.

Will it never end?

“He’s right.”

Remus turns around. He expects to find that his ears have fooled him, and it wasn’t really Sirius who spoke.

“I, personally,” Sirius continues, “have had enough of near-death experiences for this year. Maybe we ought to…let this one lie.”

From the look on James’ face, Sirius might’ve just suggested that they all take up eating babies. “He tried to KILL you!”

“And I tried to kill him,” Sirius replies, casual as anything. “Twice. I was going to do it if he didn’t keep his mouth shut about Moony, I really would’ve. And now he knows that I will, so he won’t try it. Plus, whatever McGonagall’s gonna do to him…” He shrugs. “The scales are even now. Me and him— we’re even.”

The sky is almost fully lightened now, and Remus feels something similar happening under his breastbone. He isn’t sure what to make of it. It’s not unlike relief.

“If you lot don’t mind, I’m going to sleep,” Sirius announces, de-stacking his pillows, mouth tipped in a wry, bluish smile. “I’m a bit tired, for some reason.”

 

***

 

O.W.L.s come to an end. The last weekend of term slides in on a collective sigh of relief from the fifth and seventh years. Free at last from the overhanging spectre of exams, they’re content to laze around in whatever patches of shade they can find on the swelteringly hot grounds, heat wave be damned. Remus and James and Peter split their time between relaxing (“Nope,” James declared at the prospect of an end-of-year prank. “I’m focusing all my energy on doing nothing, and that’s that.”) and visiting Sirius, who grows increasingly irritable in the hospital wing. ‘Special arrangements’ were made for his last exam.

“Just means I took the thing in here while Pomfrey called time-out every twenty minutes to give me more potion,” Sirius explains. “Took for-bloody- _ever_.”

By Sunday his colour is looking more normal, but Madam Pomfrey announces her intention to keep him another day until the term is officially finished. Sirius complains about having to miss the end of term feast, but privately Remus thinks it’s a great decision. For all that Sirius talked about “letting it lie” with Snape, Remus isn’t convinced his resolution would hold if he saw him in person.

The day comes that the Hogwarts Express is scheduled to take them back to London. The three of them wake up early out of some instinctive restlessness, then set out their trunks to be eventually magicked onto the train before heading down to breakfast. James is detailing his plans to have a nice quiet holiday without any “tomfoolery” when Remus, who heartily doubts it, is startled by a letter falling onto his plate.

“Who’s it from?” asks Peter.

“Mum,” he answers, reading. “My grandfather’s to have…” He squints. “…some sort of surgery that I can’t pronounce—”

“A what?” asks James.

“Surgery,” Peter says. “It’s when Muggle doctors cut you open.”

“When they WHAT?!”

“—and we’ll be staying with him while he recovers.”

“How long?”

Remus reads some more and groans. “A month.”

“I thought you liked him? He’s the one who gives you all those enormously boring old books.”

“I do like him, it’s just that a month with an elderly Ancient Greek professor, it’s not— _bollocks_ ,” Remus says, remembering. “I borrowed his _Argonautica_ , I should give it back but I didn’t pack it.”

Peter checks his watch. “You’ve got loads of time to go put it in your trunk, it’s still early yet.”

“Unless they’ve already moved ’em,” James says around a mouthful of bacon.

Remus is relieved when he opens the door to the dormitory and sees their trunks still there. What he feels when he sees Sirius reclining on his bed, waving his wand to send objects flying across the room into his open trunk, is more complex.

Sirius sees him. A lump of mismatched socks and _1000 Magical Herbs and Fungi_ drop to the floor. “Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” Remus answers. He’s still standing there, hovering in the doorway like an idiot, but he doesn’t know what else to do with himself. “She let you out, then?”

Good sport he is, Sirius ignores the stupidity of this question.

“Only just," he replies. "Kept me long as she could— I’ll never get the taste of that godawful blood restoring draught out of my mouth.”

Remus grimaces sympathetically. He knows it well. “Cabbages?”

Sirius answers with a sober nod. “Cabbages.” He rolls his eyes. “She didn’t even give me time to pack. Hence…” He waves an arm at the state of disarray the room is in, the floor covered in various belongings that didn’t make it to the trunk.

“You could just do it the normal way.”

“Nonsense, I’m utilising my magical education. Here, look.” He gestures him over.

Remus briefly worries if sitting on the bed next to him would be weird, but standing over him would be even weirder, so he gets over himself. He sits down.

Sirius scoots over to make room and clears his throat. “Like so.”

He points his wand at the haphazard heap of books in his trunk and gives it a fussy little wave, as if to settle them into a neat stack. The books float into the air and tumble down in a messy pile again. “Oh, fucker.”

There’s no real reason for that to be so hilarious, but something about all of it makes Remus burst out laughing. The comic _thump_ of the books, the sound of _oh fucker_ in Sirius’ dry, aristocratic accent; the fact that Sirius is here, colour in his face again, stretched out in his usual controlled sprawl and hip-to-hip with Remus like the old days, as if nothing had changed at all.

"Oh, I almost forgot." Sirius says it in a forcibly casual manner that makes Remus doubt the truth of the statement. " _Accio_." A small plastic jar flies over. He passes it to Remus. "Found this while I was packing. Was going to give it to you for your birthday, but I forgot the day of, and then afterward I--" He stumbles. "I kept forgetting."

_Because we weren't speaking and then broke up_ , Remus' brain supplies, unhelpfully. 

He looks at the jar in his hands. According to the label, it's rather posh women's under-eye cream. Remus raises his eyebrows. "Showing my age, am I?"

"It's not actually eye cream. I mean, it was, I nicked it from my mum, but just as-- I put the glamour on it. The glamour I made up, remember?"

_ The one designed to hide the bruises I sucked into your _   _neck,_ says Remus' brain. Still unhelpful.

"Yeah?"

"It's for your scars," Sirius explains. "Not that there's anything wrong with them, of course, I think they're--" He visibly backtracks. "I know you don't much go in for parading them around in public, and short sleeves have never been your bag, but it's supposed to be hot this summer, and...well." Sirius gives a weak little wave of his hand. "Happy, er. Birthday, I guess."

Remus looks down at the little jar, then up at Sirius' face. His expression flickers from expectant to...something. Remus feels quite overcome. 

"Thank you," he says.

The moment is over. Now would be the natural point for Remus to get up off of Sirius' bed, where they're sitting close enough that their legs are pressed together. Now is the time to stand, find Grandfather's  _Argonautica_ , pack it and the jar of glamoured eye cream, give Sirius one final thank you, and leave. 

They sit. They share a silence that hasn't been this companionable in months. 

Finally, Sirius speaks. “Some year, huh?”

“They always say fifth year is hell.”

“Something tells me they didn’t mean it like this,” Sirius says, faux-thoughtful. “You’re the one who almost died twice.”

Remus feels suddenly defensive. "So did you! Twice!"

“Fine, yeah, you’re right, alright.”

Remus lets out a mumbling noise that even he isn't sure the meaning of. Then he says, “I’m…glad you didn’t.”

"What? Die?"

"Yeah."

Sirius looks at him. “Well shucks, Moony,” he deadpans.

“That came out wrong. Sort of. I don’t know what I’m trying to say, I’m sorry.”

Sirius snorts and raises his wand, back to his work. A bundle of robes come hurtling out of the wardrobe only to hit the wall opposite and flop into a puddle on the magicked turntable. With a frustrated noise Sirius slides down the headboard, settling on his elbows. And out of nowhere at all, the silence is no longer companionable. With Remus sitting up and Sirius slid down beside him, a tense moment passes.

Slowly, deliberately, Sirius lets his head tip sideways onto Remus’ shoulder. A decision made. No take-backs. Remus holds his breath.

“I keep listening to that stupid Bowie album,” Sirius mumbles. “The one we listened to in the mirror passageway, remember? When we talked that one time?”

Remus doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he nods.

“That was _months_ ago, but whenever you lot aren’t in here, I…fuck. I must’ve worn out the vinyl by now.”

“I miss you,” Remus says.

He can’t see Sirius’ face from this angle. “We live in the same room. You’re around me a bit.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Fill me in, then.”

“I…I mean…”

Remus swallows around the tightness in his throat and tries to think of the right words. Then he gives up on that and says exactly what he’s thinking.

“This is _mad_ , Sirius. I don’t know what I imagine the plan is with something like this— sneaking round and trying to keep secrets from our exceptionally clever friends, for starters, that’s _insane_. But also just with the way you and I are, we’re so different, it’s obvious we are, but somehow you’re still my oldest friend and you, you feel like…I don’t know, it’s as if you’re…Christ, it sounds cliché to say you’re ‘a part of me’, I feel stupid just saying so because that’s not even what I mean, but I don’t know how to express it, it’s… it’s as if…”

He exhales hard. “It’s as if I’m the most like myself when I’m around you. Does that make sense? I don’t usually like myself, but I do when I’m with you. I feel so much _better_ with you, to the point that staying away from you has felt as much like punishing myself as anything else, which I’ve realised I’m fairly prone to doing, and then— then I had to sit in the hospital wing with the others while you lay there looking dead and I had to pretend that it wasn’t driving me _absolutely_ — have I mentioned how mad this is? They’d work it out eventually, obviously they would.”

He looks down at the top of Sirius’ head, half hoping he’ll cut him off, but he doesn’t. Remus keeps talking. “It’s the maddest thing I’ve ever done, trying to be with you. But I can’t get myself to accept that, because it doesn’t feel mad at all. It feels entirely normal, it feels _obvious_ , do you know what I mean? Like…of course. Of course I’d feel like this. Because you’re _you_ , how else am I supposed to feel? You’re you and I’m me and this is how we are and that’s…that’s the point. That’s the whole _point_.” He swallows. His throat is tight again. “I just don’t know what to do with that.”

Finally, Sirius moves. He sits up and turns his head, bringing their faces level, and stares at Remus with a contemplative look on his face, creasing the space between his eyebrows. He chews thoughtfully on his bottom lip. Then he says, “I think you kiss me. I think that’s what you do with that.”

Remus does.

He never does pack the book.

 

***

 

"They haven't seen you yet," James reports, peering around the lip of the doorway. He sees Sirius' parents in the crowd on the platform, Mrs Black hugging Regulus with obvious joy while Mr Black fusses with his son’s trunk. "We'll say you drowned in the lake, hide you under the Cloak, and take you with us."

Sirius rolls his eyes. "Fat chance."

"We'll say you were strangled by a hinkypunk. Died of boredom in Binns’ class. Got mauled by a werewolf in an ill-fitting jumper.”

Remus shoots him a _we’re in public please don’t be an idiot_ look. "C'mon, we're holding everybody up."

They pour out of the train into the crowded station and immediately James' mum swoops down on them. She almost looks disapproving when she embraces James, saying, “Ergh, mere laal, you've grown a foot!"

"Sorry?" James says, but she's already let go of him, having spotted Sirius.

She laughs, puts her hands on either side of his face, and scolds, "You! Who cuts your hair, eh?"

He smirks. "That'd be you, Mum."

"Then you'll have to come back to us very soon, then, because it's gotten out of hand again," she says, pulling him in for a squeeze.

Dad appears out of the crowd, toting a trolley for James' trunk. He hugs both of them, smiling broadly, and says, "Didn't get into too much trouble, boys?"

"Nah, nice quiet year," James tells him. Sirius snorts; Mum rolls her eyes.

"So, when're you coming to see us?" Dad asks Sirius. "We prefer your room occupied-- James tried to make his own firecrackers in there last holiday.”

"It would've worked," James grumbles.

Sirius grimaces, glancing tellingly toward his family at the other end of the platform. "Outlook isn't great."

"Oh, well," says Mum. "We'll work something out. Very soon."

Sirius gives a weak smile. "I hope so."

It brasses James off as much as it always does, seeing the look on Mr and Mrs Black's faces when Sirius goes to join them and Regulus. Who doesn’t even _pretend_ to be excited to see their oldest son? He watches with Mum and Dad and hears Mum's low, sad noise.

"We'll work something out," she repeats, more quietly this time. "He won't have to be there all summer, not if we have anything to say about it."

James nods, then turns to heft his trunk onto the trolley. “Hope you're right."

 

***

 

The month at his grandfather’s on the coast lasts about a thousand years. The heatwave burns on at historic highs while the drought-ridden countryside parches to a dusty brown, hosepipes are cut off, and the newspapers fill with oddly condescending advice on How To Beat The Heat. Devon boils under the summer sun while Remus, likewise, simmers.

He can’t even write to Sirius from here; owls are out of the question in his Muggle grandfather’s tiny cottage. Something other than the drought is frying Remus’ brain in his skull, and it has everything to do with passionately snogging Sirius for the first time since February and then not seeing him for a month. Even as the papers report thousands of overheated cars breaking down across the country, he spends most of his stay in Devon practising with his recently acquired provisional. It’s a bit silly to have a car in London (his mother’s old beige station wagon is a relic from their former life in the suburbs), but Remus desperately needs to keep himself busy.

They’re home in time for the full moon. It’s a few days later that Remus finds himself with sweat sticking the back of his shirt to the driver’s seat of the station wagon, parked in front of a storefront chemist’s in Islington, and something about the generic red sign seems to scream _prearranged meeting place for an illicit affair_ but, then, maybe that’s just his nerves talking.

It’s probably better that Sirius manages to sneak up on him. Remus is staring out the opposite window when the passenger side door flies open and something lands heavily over his knees and starts kissing him.

He doesn’t even have time to be properly shocked before he’s pulling back against the seat, extraordinarily confused. “What—” He gapes. “Did you— have you got a _ring in your lip?_ ”

Cramped ungracefully against the steering wheel, Sirius grins wickedly. He’s got a ring in his lip. He’s also wearing makeup: careless smears of purple-red liner around his eyes.

“Yeah, bit inconvenient, isn’t it?” he says. He casually twists the tiny silver hoop out of his own flesh, like a bloody fishhook, and stows it in his pocket.

That’s when Remus notices his clothes. “Did you get mugged?” he asks, only sort of joking.

“It’s _anti-fashion_ , it’s supposed to look like that.”

His t-shirt looks as though somebody’s taken scissors to it with their eyes shut, snipping it full of holes and ripping away the sleeves. In stenciled letters it reads ONLY ANARCHISTS ARE PRETTY. His jeans are torn and frayed at the knees.

“I see,” Remus lies. Maybe it’s the more-than-usual amount of bare skin, but he also seems to have a lot of bruises. He brushes a finger up Sirius’ arm, patchworked purple and yellow and green. “Sure you didn't get beat up?”

“I’ve been to shows!” Sirius’ eyes light up with excitement. Or maybe it’s the eyeliner. He drops into the passenger’s seat, a heap of limbs. “They’ve got them just about every night if you know where to look.”

“Shows? Like concerts?”

“Yeah, small gigs mostly, underground stuff. But— Merlin’s bollocks, there was the most fucking incredible one last week at the Roundhouse, it was this American group, I’d never heard anything like it in my _life_ , people went bloody berserk and now any club you go into, the house band’s trying to sound like them—”

“But how d’you get bruises at these things?”

“Got stepped on a bit. Eh, that was my own fault,” he says with a dismissive wave at Remus’ shocked expression. “They get a bit rough. Got to hold your own in these places if you’re going to stay on your feet, know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Whatever,” Sirius says, and then he’s clambering back on top of Remus again. The angle’s awkward, which he tries to overcome by twisting his torso and planting one foot on the seat as leverage. It does not work.

Remus laughs harder than he has in weeks. “Are you stuck?”

“No!” Sirius hitches his leg up at an improbable angle, hooks it over Remus’ lap, and promptly smacks his head against the ceiling. “ _Fuck!_ ”

While he struggles for breath through his laughter, Remus wonders how he was ever nervous. It’s just Sirius.

“We can’t sit here and snog in the middle of the street,” Remus says as he wraps his arms around him, which, admittedly, is a bit of a mixed signal.

“Watch me.” Sirius cranes down, and that kiss might’ve managed to land if Remus wasn’t too busy shaking with laughter to fully commit. Hard-done-by, Sirius sighs, “Ergh, fine.” He gets back into his seat. “Spoilsport.”

They end up driving aimlessly, Remus taking streets at random while Sirius, who has never been in a car before, soaks in the experience with glee.

“Trains are one thing!” he says. He’s got his head stuck out the open window and looks so unmistakably, hilariously doglike that Remus is having trouble keeping it together. “But these things, they seem so much _faster_!” He grins, exhilarated, as a loudly honking car cuts them off. “Is this how riding a motorbike feels, d’you think?”

“Does my mother’s fifteen-year-old station wagon drive like a motorbike? I very much doubt it.”

Sirius makes a petulant _mmph_ noise before going for the radio dial. But the radio doesn’t seem to have anything to Sirius’ liking: he flips through with a sour look on his face, audibly snorting at several things, including a Peter Frampton tune Remus rather likes and the same Brotherhood of Man song they’ve passed on three different stations.

Eventually Remus hears a voice that makes him stop Sirius’ hand on the dashboard. “Hang on— isn’t that your friend? The wizard from Brianna’s shop?”

“… _worst heatwave in Britain’s history, would you believe that? I expect you would, if you’ve been in the country for longer than five minutes and taken notice of how bloody effing hot it is._ ”

“Yeah, that’s Malcolm!” Sirius says. Then he snorts. “He’s been such a drag lately. He doesn’t appreciate the power he’s got as a DJ.” He puts on a mocking voice: “‘I’ll spin punk on my station when one of the little twats puts out a single’. They _have_ , they’ve been putting them out in America for ages!”

Remus, who has no idea what he’s talking about, hums sympathetically with his eyes on the road.

“ _A lion fainted at a circus in Norwich. A_ lion _, folks! They only live on the bloody serengeti, you’d think English weather wouldn’t be a problem, but there you have it. Suppose the world’s finally burning down. Speaking of the end of the world, here’s Mott the Hoople._ ”

Remus is proud of himself for actually recognising the beginning notes of the next song, but again Sirius snorts.

“Merlin, see? This song is ancient. Mal has the guts to tell _me_ that wizards are afraid of change.”

“Is this old?” Remus asks.

“Four years!”

“Right,” Remus says. Sirius has always had a funny concept of what ‘old’ music is.

Despite his complaint, though, Sirius doesn’t change the station.

“I’ve heard this before, but I don’t get it,” Remus says, listening as verse slides into chorus. “What’s the ‘news’?”

“Well,” Sirius answers, sounding awfully eager for a person who doesn’t approve of this song, “David Bowie wrote it, because it was originally meant to be on _Ziggy Stardust_ , but he gave it to these blokes to record instead. It doesn’t make a lot of sense outside the story of the album.”

“What’s the story?”

“Basically that the apocalypse is coming and this alien named Ziggy Stardust is going to save everybody with rock and roll.” Sirius shrugs. “Alright, I guess none of it makes any sense. But, anyway— the idea of the song is that they’re going and carrying the news that the earth has only got five more years left. Just five years.”

“Why five?”

“Dunno.”

“So…” says Remus. “That means the ‘news’ is…”

They stop at a light and Remus takes the opportunity to look over at him. Sirius has propped his heavy, military-style boots up on the dashboard and Remus would tell him off if he didn’t look so damn good doing it. A hot breeze rolls in through the window and stirs his hair as he drums black nails on his knee, the skin bared there by ripped denim. Even with holes in his clothes he’s too perfect to be real. He looks like an advert, for blue jeans or cigarettes or some other cool youthful thing.

“The end of the world,” he answers.

“Ah.”

“Yeah.” Sirius shrugs again. “‘Carry the news’. Everybody thought it was this great hymn to the youth when it came out, but nope. It’s just about…y’know. How doomed they are.”

“I don’t see why they’re mutually exclusive,” says Remus.

“Guess not.”

“Hymn to the doomed youth.”

“Sure.”

“Quite poetic, that.”

“I guess.”

The light turns green, Remus turns at random. “What would you do, then? If the world were ending in—” he counts quickly, “—1981?”

Sirius considers at length. Then he settles on, “Burn my house to the ground.”

A car’s broken down ahead; another engine overheated.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

Remus is confused. “I wasn’t looking at you at all."

“I’d get Reg out first.”

“And your parents?”

He fancies he can hear Sirius shrug. “Depends on my mood, I suppose. What about you?” he asks. “What would you do if the apocalypse were coming in five years?”

“I…” Remus tries to imagine five years in the future, who he’ll be. He tries to imagine _one_. He can’t. “I don’t know. I don’t think that far ahead.”

“Oh, hey, turn down there.”

“There?”

“Yeah, I’ll direct you.”

A while later they end up behind a cluster of desolate-looking buildings; the whole street looks deserted. Sirius leads them into an empty, crumbling car park.

On the other side of a median planted with long-dead bushes Remus cuts the engine. “Alright, what stupid plan have you got now?”

“What makes you think I’ve got one of those?”

“You had me drive into this dodgy car park for a reason, I’m sure.”

“The reason we are in this dodgy car park is twofold,” Sirius explains. “One: there happens to be a pocket of wizarding homes here and the Trace can’t tell who’s doing what, which leaves me free to do stuff like this—” He pulls his wand from his jeans and waves it; the temperature in the car drops considerably.

“Good call,” Remus says, pushing the sweaty hair from his face.

“Secondly,” Sirius continues, and he’s pushing off of his seat, “You’re not about to find an emptier spot than a wizarding carpark.” He propels himself over, narrowly avoids breaking Remus’ nose with his boot, and tumbles clumsily into the backseat.

Remus’ heart rockets up into his throat, which is probably why he only manages to say, “Er—”

“You’re the one who said we couldn’t snog in the street.”

He takes a steadying breath. “Well…” He gives a great show of deliberating the point, trying to contain the smile tugging at his mouth. “I suppose I _did_ say that…”

As Sirius gives a great bark of laughter Remus climbs after him. He topples into the backseat where he’s immediately caught in Sirius’ arms and pulled into a kiss.

It’s zero to sixty in a second— or however long a strangled groan from Sirius takes, because that’s what hits Remus like a kick to the stomach and makes him lose track of himself until suddenly he’s got both hands buried in long dark hair and feels a bit like he’s dying. He feels himself dragged down, and then there’s the painful-sounding _thwack_ of Sirius’ head against the car door when he falls backwards but he doesn’t seem to mind, just stretches horizontally across the beige vinyl as much as his long legs will allow and hauls Remus on top of him, winds him in his arms and pulls him closer and closer.

Remus breaks away an inch to swallow a breath and he must’ve made some sort of undignified sound in the process (it may have been a gasp of “oh God”, but that’s just a hypothesis) because Sirius is laughing. Remus feels gratified, though, in that the laugh is noticeably breathless. Maybe he’s not the only one who’s nervous.

“All right there, Moony?”

“Yeah, fine, I’m, ah,” He gulps down air, swallows, prays for courage— “I don’t suppose you remember where we left off, that morning in February?”

A nip at his throat, a smile pressed to the skin there: “I’ve an excellent memory.”

“I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.” Remus hopes his voice only sounds that desperate and terrified to his own ears.

“You think I do?” He’s already craning around Remus to tug at the laces on his boots. “Can’t be that difficult, people far dumber than us work it out all the time.”

He nods, frantic. “Yeah. Right.”

Sirius rolls his eyes. “Start with your shoes, then. No sensual way to do that, I don’t think.”

He nods again and does as he’s told. Thirty seconds later he finds himself back to hovering over Sirius, who’s tugging him free of his shirt, who’s running appreciative hands over his bony shoulders with their thick, ugly knots of scar tissue and looking up at him with those steely eyes of his gone dark and saying, all casual, “Y’know, you’re the most gorgeous person on the planet.”

Remus bursts out laughing. “You have seen other human beings before, right? I’m not the only one you’ve seen?”

He’s laughing too, the giddy, breathy kind that bubbles out of him when he’s happy. “My evil pureblood parents keep me locked up in the cellar!” He gives another bark of laughter at Remus’ theatrical gasp. Then the humour falls from his face, leaving his expression plain and unguarded, and very simply Sirius tells him, “I’ve never wanted anybody like I want you.”

Not for the first time, not for the first time in the last fifteen minutes, Remus is in awe of him. To feel things as strongly as Sirius feels everything and then to wear it on his sleeve— it’s unimaginable. He’s full of fire with no fear of burning and it’s a kind of bravery that Remus will never be able to understand.

It’s also the hottest thing he’s ever heard. “You’re going to kill me," Remus says.

“No, you’re forbidden from dying, I’m not through with you,” Sirius faux-scolds, a remarkable tone to have achieved while undoing his own belt. “You’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.”

And Remus is back to full-body laughing again. “‘A couple of minutes’? Is that all?”

“I’m only being _realistic._ ”

They don’t talk a lot after that.

 

***

 

When Sirius finally has to go home, he has Remus drop him off several blocks down the street. Remus has never seen this godawful place, and Sirius hopes to keep it that way.

Dusk has fallen, dark blue, behind the windows as he creeps through the shadowy house. He doesn’t think his parents are home, but he doesn’t want to risk it; he can’t stomach them today. He’ll go to his room and lock himself in and damned be whoever tries to make him come down to dinner. He makes it all the way to the topmost landing before he jumps at the sound of a door creaking open.

Regulus looks as startled as Sirius is. He’s spattered in paint up to his forearms, with that dragged-back-to-Earth look on his face he gets when he’s been working on something for hours. “Oh. I didn’t think you’d be home.”

“Moony’s mum wanted him back before dark.” It comes out sounding more defensive than he thought it would.

“You were with Lupin?” Regulus asks, an odd look on his face.

“Yeah, so?” Sirius snaps. The little prat keeps staring at him. “What?”

Regulus edges out onto the landing. As he turns for the stairs he says, quietly, “Don’t let Mum see your neck.”

Feeling embarrassed and defiant and afraid all at once, Sirius slaps a hand over his throat and opens his mouth to say…something. But Regulus has already gone.

 

***

 

It’s proving to be one of the more memorable summers of Remus’ life.

This underground culture that Sirius has found refuge in— occupying his nights while Remus is obediently home before dark— shows up on him more and more every day. It’s as if every time he climbs into Remus’ car there are new bits of metal on him: chains and pins and little silver studs on his clothes, steel rings on his fingers, leather bracelets with spikes. It puts Remus in mind of armour: Sirius going home in the early hours, barbed.

“I’m the only one who’s still got long hair, though,” Sirius says with a dismissive scrub through the thick, wavy hair tumbling to his shoulders. They’re sitting on a sidewalk in northwestern London, loitering with great conviction. “At first I was gonna do the Johnny Rotten thing, y’know, chop it all off and dye it green or orange or whatever—”

Remus’ stomach drops in horror.

“—but then it occurred to me how stupid that is. Defeats the whole bloody purpose, doesn’t it? It’s about _breaking the rules_ , not following anybody’s orders, so how am I gonna live with myself for following their fucking dress code just to fit in? Bollocks.” He lights one of the cigarettes he got from god-knows-where, another new habit of his. “I like my hair.”

There’s something dissonant about the whole thing on him, the rough-hewn proletariat theme of it. The smell of money oozes out of Sirius no matter how hard he tries to stifle it, no matter how many tattered shirts he wears.

That’s not all it is, though. Sirius has always been naturally cool, effortlessly casual in the way he moves, but it’s an archaic cool: just a little too artful and aloof and Edwardian to blend in with the lean-and-hungry punks they see on street corners. Now he reclines on the crumbling kerb like a monologuing Oscar Wilde dandy, combat boots crossed at the ankles, eye makeup bleeding in the heat, and Remus can’t tell if it’s hilarious or stupidly attractive.

Both, it would seem. “I like your hair, too.”

Sirius barks a laugh. “I know _you_ do. Can’t keep your bloody hands out of it, can you?”

They drive around in Remus' mum's car and listen to the radio. This is a real source of entertainment for Remus, since hardly anything that's playing is ever up to Sirius' standards, and he has amusingly unique ways of hating each genre. The likes of Pink Floyd and Yes garner a haughty anti-establishment disgust (“Elitist, overblown, pretentious _shite_ ,” he growls, blowing cigarette smoke out the window), and the odd disco tune gets flat revulsion, but Remus' favourite by far is the theatrical horror demonstrated when he settles on a folk station for longer than half a second. Remus almost crashes the car the time that he, just for fun, slaps his hand firmly over the dial and shouts along to what he remembers of "Mr Tambourine Man".

Hands over his ears, Sirius screams bloody murder. “I fucking hate you!”

" _In the jingle-jangle mornin' I'll come followin' you--_ "

“In the jingle-jangle mornin' I'll _kick your arse!_ "

They loiter and they smoke and they shout about The Byrds. They do other things, too.

Maybe it's the heat, boiling the whole city to the edge of madness, but Remus has never felt less like himself. It's a very particular insanity that's possessed him, the way they can’t keep off of each other. It’ll be at the drop of a hat, at _nothing_ , a smile might set him off, and then he's pulling Sirius into the nearest hidden alleyway and pressing his back to the brick, and Sirius laughs wickedly with a victorious tilt to his grin like everything’s going accordingly to plan, because he always knows what he's doing when he looks at him like that, he knows every time. Then they’re all over each other and there’s feverish muttering and Sirius gasps brokenly as if he's surprised that Remus even _knows_ those words and when Remus' brain comes online again he's strolling back onto the street brushing gravel from his knees-- Jesus Christ, he was such a nice kid before, what _happened?_ Wasn’t he a prefect a month ago? What's come over him? Why didn't it do it sooner?

All in all, he never thought he’d end up here: damp with sweat in the backseat of his mother’s car in an abandoned car park, the windows down to let out the spicy smoke from a joint he’s sharing with Sirius, who is, like him, wearing exactly nothing as they lie draped over each other, loose-limbed, bare feet propped on the front seat. None of it is what he’d expect from himself, it’s the type of life belonging to somebody cooler and tougher and braver by far than he is. He doesn’t recognise this new version of himself. He thinks he likes it.

"How is it at home?"

Sirius sighs, exhaling a long stream of smoke. He passes the joint to Remus and for a moment watches the smoke dissolve in the sunlight. The radio's on, a Mick Ronson song floating queasily through the humidity. _Growing up and I'm fi-i-i-ine._

"Not much to tell," Sirius answers eventually.

"I just haven't heard you mention them at all."

"Why would I mention them? They're the most boring people in the world."

"Do they mind that you’re always out?”

He snorts. "They prefer it. I don’t see them at all if I can help it. The shows I go to start after they’re asleep and before that there’s Brianna's shop, and this boutique place on King's Road where everybody hangs out…”

By now Remus knows not to ask about the identities of "everybody"; their run-ins with Sirius' friends from _the scene_ make him feel extraordinarily uncool.

He takes a drag, lets the smoke out on, "Do you see your cousins ever?"

"Oh yeah, me and lovely Bellatrix are the best of mates,” Sirius says, rolling his eyes. "We may look like brother and sister but the similarity ends there, I promise you."

"Andromeda?"

“’Course not. She’s out of the country by now.”

"Y'know," says Remus. "I've never asked. What's your mum's family like?"

“Huh?”

"I mean, the side of your family that isn't the Blacks. I've heard about your Uncle Alphard, but--"

He cuts off at Sirius' laugh.

"Moony," he says, "my mum's family _is_ the Blacks." Remus doesn’t know what his face does, but it makes Sirius smile wryly. He answers the unvoiced question: "Second cousins. Mum didn't have to change her surname.”

Remus nods. "Ah."

That makes Sirius laugh again. "You always thought I was joking about being inbred, didn't you?"

“Second cousins isn’t…” he says, very carefully. "It...well, it could be worse.”

Sirius just laughs at him harder. Then he swipes sweaty hair from his forehead and declares, “It’s bloody hot out.”

“Yeah, I think people have noticed that.”

“Wise arse.”

“Just do that cooling spell.”

“But I’ll still be _sweaty_ ,” Sirius complains. He ducks down to find clothes, attempting to pull on his shirt (ragged as usual, with a Union Jack on and the stenciled letters ‘DESTROY’) with the lit joint in his hand. “C’mon, I’ve an idea.”

“Where are we going?”

He throws Remus his trousers. “You’ll see.”

They drive south toward the Thames until the embankment is in sight. Sirius has his elbow out the open window, finishing the joint as they weave through traffic. Remus asks, “Do you aspire to getting us arrested?”

Sirius looks affronted. “It’s punk, Moony."

He still doesn’t tell Remus where they’re going when he instructs him to park the car, or when they make their way down Charing Cross Road on foot, Sirius and his strange clothes attracting looks as usual. It’s not until they turn onto Trafalgar Square and Sirius marches past the lions into the crowd of sweating tourists that Remus starts to get the idea.

Remus points ahead at the two huge fountains in the heart of the square— or, rather, at the several policemen stationed around the perimeters of both fountains, clearly intending to prevent exactly what Sirius is proposing. “I think it’s a no-go.”

With an insolent toss of his head Sirius shakes the hair from his face. “Awfully quick to give up, aren’t you?” He looks around the area: irritable-looking parents of children gone fussy in the heat, teenagers in shorts eyeing the fountains with longing. “Don’t move,” he says, and before Remus can react, he takes off across the square.

“Wh— Hey!”

Too late: Sirius runs full-tilt into the street, plunges through midday traffic, dodges double-decker buses to a clamour of car horns. He emerges on the other side and keeps running, darts into the gap between two buildings, and disappears.

To himself, Remus says, “What the fuck?”

For a couple of minutes Remus stands there, confused. Then across the square he hears more commotion in the street, more car horns; he turns around.

Something enormous covered in black fur is galloping toward Trafalgar Square, leaping from the sidewalk over the low wall onto the pavement below. Several people shout; the crowd ripples to make way. The closest policeman steps forward, alarmed, but no one dares get in the way of the huge, ferocious-looking black dog— ferocious-looking, that is, until it gives a joyful bark, takes a running jump at the fountain, and lands with a splash.

Surprised shrieks and shouts of laughter come up from the onlookers while the dog stomps around in the water, chasing its tail, sending waves of displaced water sloshing over the sides in bucketfuls, soaking the concrete and anyone who gets close. The dog gives another great bounding leap that sends up an even bigger wave and it barks at the air, clearly enjoying itself.

Remus, about to break a rib trying not to laugh, pushes through the crowd to the fountain. He leans over the edge and calls, “ _So_ clever, aren’t you?”

The dog barks again, and with a swish of its tail sprays him with a shock of cold water to the face.

“You there!”

Remus turns: a policeman is shouting at him from the other side of the fountain, looking rattled and frustrated and rather damp. “This your dog?”

Somehow Remus manages not to laugh. Straight-faced and penitent, he calls back, “Yessir, sorry!” He clicks his fingers at the dog, now bounding laps around the perimeter of the fountain. “Padfoot, no! Bad dog!”

The dog splashes its way over, slaps its big front paws onto the fountain’s edge, and— Remus raises his arms to protect himself a second too late— licks the side of his face.

With a sound like “ _ghuuackaagh!_ ” Remus shoves it off of him. “Fuck you,” he says to the dog, probably a bit too loudly.

“Get it out of here!” the policeman shouts over the commotion. “Can’t you train that thing?”

“Believe me officer, I’ve tried,” Remus calls back. The dog barks at him, irritated, and this time he can’t help the unbecoming snort of laughter that bursts out of him.

The dog pushes up onto the ledge with its front paws and leaps out of the fountain, waterlogged fur hanging flat from its head and back. Remus knows what’s about to happen during the second he stands there, watching the soaking wet dog surrounded by onlookers, but he can’t stop it--

The loudest reaction yet comes up from the crowd as the dog shakes. Everyone in the near vicinity gets a splash, with those closest looking as if they’ve just stepped out of a hurricane. It takes Remus a moment to notice, in his newly-drenched state, that the majority of the clamour isn’t disapproving— on all sides he sees teenagers cheering, couples laughing, everybody welcoming the respite from the heat. Remus smiles.

An instant later, the dog is moving again, bolting across the square for the street, and he’s got no choice but to make chase. It runs into traffic again.

“You couldn’t find a bloody crosswalk?” Remus shouts after the dog as it disappears between two huge red buses. But when the buses clear again the dog is gone; a boy stands in its place.

Sirius grins at him from the other side of Charing Cross Road. “No!” he calls. Then he turns on his heel and sprints off again.

Remus curses, looks around, and goes to the bloody crosswalk.

It doesn’t take him long to find Sirius: Remus locates the darkest, dingiest, most secluded alley in the area and turns. He’s leaned up against the graffitied wall, soaking wet and terribly pleased with himself. “To answer your question,” he drawls, “yes, I _am_ so clever.”

“You can’t just _lick my face_ ,” Remus says as he approaches. “I don’t care if you’re a dog or not, it’s disgusting.”

Sirius laughs so hard he doubles over.

“What?” Remus asks.

“That’s where you draw the line, eh?” Sirius manages, still shaking with laughter. “All the spots on you my mouth’s been—licking your face is _indecent!_ ”

“You’re a child,” Remus says with dignity. He’s probably going red.

“Yeah, but I’m right.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Not that I’ve anything against indecency, mind,” Sirius says as he saunters up into his space, hooking deft fingers through the belt loops on Remus’ jeans and tugging him forward, which is about the time that Remus decides he ought to check that the coast is clear.

“Heel, boy,” he jokes, looking up and down the alley: there’s a skip at the entrance, and the other side is a dead end. Secluded, then.

When he turns his head back he isn’t expecting the look that’s on Sirius’ face, or for him to drop his voice into that low register he uses when he wants to truly _kill_ Remus and say, “Is it weird that I liked that?”

“Er,” Remus replies with great eloquence. His knees have gone wobbly. “Probably?”

Smile so wicked it’s a sin by itself, Sirius backs up against the dirty brick wall and drags him in.

 

***

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I recommend giving the UK heatwave of 1976 a google search: it was a fascinating period sociopolitically, with a lot of converging elements, and is arguably responsible for the birth of UK punk that summer. Only about 1% of the stuff I learned actually made it into the fic, unfortunately. The thing about the lion passing out in the circus, at least, is true.


End file.
